The MODIS Active Fire Products are widely used by both the global change research and fire applications community. This proposal is to support three major activities associated with the continued NASA provision of satellite active fire products.
The first set of activities is to continue the maintenance of the MODIS Active Fire Products generated from the Terra and Aqua, instruments. This will include routine science quality assessment and any product refinement needed as a function of validation activities and aging instrument performance. The maintenance task will include updating code changes in the MODIS active fire Direct Broadcast code. The proposal will complete the MODIS Terra product validation using ASTER data. Emphasis will be given to validating the MODIS Fire Radiative Power sub-product.
The second set of activities is to continue the evaluation of the VIIRS Active Fire EDR, identifying and implementing improvements to make the product suitable for global change research with the aim of providing dynamic product continuity with the MODIS products, thus contributing to the transition of MODIS research capabilities into the operational domain. These first two activities were in part, previously funded under separate MODIS and NPP Science Team proposals. The third activity will be to design and initiate a NASA Active Fire ESDR using data from multiple instruments, based primarily on the data products from MODIS and VIIRS. We will also evaluate the science value added, feasibility and cost of extending the ESDR retrospectively, using data from other satellites i.e. the AVHRR 1km data and ATSR. In addition, a study will be undertaken to summarize and report global and national scale fire statistics and trends observed during the available data record.
A programmatic addendum is submitted with this proposal, for NASA to support the P.I. in the role as co-chair of the GOFC/GOLD Fire Implementation Team. This addendum is a stand-alone optional funding module for this proposal. The objective of the GOFC/GOLD Fire Implementation Team is the international coordination of fire observations, their validation and use (http://gofc-fire.umd.edu/index.asp). GOFC/GOLD a project of GTOS, provides a venue for outreach for the NASA fire products and an opportunity for developing international collaboration with respect to the proposed fire ESDR. Emphasis will be given to the international coordination associated with the Implementation Team goal of providing a consistent long-term fire data records.
