Retrieval of biomass combustion rates and totals from fire radiative power observations: Application to southern Africa using geostationary SEVIRI imagery

Abstract

Southern African wildfires are a globally significant source of trace gases and aerosols. Estimates of southern African wildfire fuel consumption have varied from hundreds to thousands of teragrams (Tg), and better-constrained estimates are required to properly assess the effects of the pollutant emissions. A new approach for providing such estimates is via remote sensing observations of fire radiative power (FRP), a variable proportional to the rate of fuel consumption. The launch of the SEVIRI radiometer onboard the geostationary Meteosat-8 platform presents a unique opportunity to monitor FRP at 15-min intervals, allowing analysis of the complete diurnal cycle of biomass burning and calculation of the total fire radiative energy. Here we present the first FRP retrievals from SEVIRI and compare them to those derived from near-coincident MODIS overpasses. Strong agreement is achieved on a per-fire basis (r 2 = 0.83, n = 139, p < 0.0001), although at the regional scale SEVIRI typically underestimates FRP with respect to MODIS due primarily to its inability to confidently detect fire pixels with FRP