Validation of the MODIS Collection 6 MCD64 Global Burned Area Product
Abstract
The research, policy and management applications of satellite products place a high priority on rigorously assessing their accuracy. A number of NASA, ESA and EU funded global and continental burned area products have been developed using coarse spatial resolution satellite data, and have the potential to become part of a long-term fire Essential Climate Variable. These products have usually been validated by comparison with reference burned area maps derived by visual interpretation of Landsat or similar spatial resolution data selected on an ad hoc basis. More optimally, a design-based validation method should be adopted, characterized by the selection of reference data via probability sampling. Design based techniques have been used for annual land cover and land cover change product validation, but have not been widely used for burned area products, or for other products that are highly variable in time and space (e.g. snow, floods, other non-permanent phenomena). This has been due to the challenge of designing an appropriate sampling strategy, and to the cost and limited availability of independent reference data. This paper describes the validation procedure adopted for the latest Collection 6 version of the MODIS Global Burned Area product (MCD64, Giglio et al, 2009). We used a tri-dimensional sampling grid that allows for probability sampling of Landsat data in time and in space (Boschetti et al, 2016). To sample the globe in the spatial domain with non-overlapping sampling units, the Thiessen Scene Area (TSA) tessellation of the Landsat WRS path/rows is used. The TSA grid is then combined with the 16-day Landsat acquisition calendar to provide tri-dimensonal elements (voxels). This allows the implementation of a sampling design where not only the location but also the time interval of the reference data is explicitly drawn through stratified random sampling. The novel sampling approach was used for the selection of a reference dataset consisting of 700 Landsat 8 image pairs, interpreted according to the CEOS Burned Area Validation Protocol (Boschetti et al., 2009). Standard quantitative burned area product accuracy measures that are important for different types of fire users (Boschetti et al, 2016, Roy and Boschetti, 2009, Boschetti et al, 2004) are computed to characterize the accuracy of the MCD64 product.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.A42C..01B
- Keywords:
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- 0305 Aerosols and particles;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0360 Radiation: transmission and scattering;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0365 Troposphere: composition and chemistry;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0368 Troposphere: constituent transport and chemistry;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE