Merging satellite-detected wildfire information with ground reports for improved fire and smoke modeling in emergency response

Researchers have used data products such as fire “hot spots” from remote sensing satellites to identify locations of actively burning fires and provide input to operational smoke forecasting models for several years. There are several disadvantages with satellite-detected fire hot spots in smoke modeling. Though they provide accurate location information, the area burned represented by a single pixel varies substantially by sensor, view geometry, fire intensity, ecosystem, fire phase, and other parameters. In addition, there is no one-to-one relationship between a satellite detected fire and a single-named fire or fire complex identified by the fire management community. In the past several years, the remote sensing community has made great strides in producing more sophisticated products for determining burn area, such as those based on burn scar algorithms. However, these products are not generally available to the fire and smoke management and emergency response communities to generate real-time smoke forecasts. The Satellite Mapping Automated Reanalysis Tool for Fire Incident Reconciliation (SMARTFIRE) is an algorithm and database system that combines and reconciles fire data from satellites with ground-based reports, thus drawing on the strengths of both data types. High spatial resolution, detection rates, and coverage of satellite-based data are augmented with burning characteristics and other metadata generated from incident command team reports. SMARTFIRE is used to provide daily fire information to smoke modeling systems both routinely and during large emergency response incidents, such as the 2007 and 2008 California wildfire events. We present the SMARTFIRE algorithms and their use in emergency response.