Geostationary active fire products validation: GOES-17 ABI, GOES-16 ABI, and Himawari AHI

Abstract

The current generation of geostationary Earth-observing satellites provide spectral bandpass, spatial resolution and imaging frequency characteristics well suited to near-continuous active fire detection and monitoring. The earliest of these systems-SEVIRI on-board EUMETSAT’s MSG series-has operated since 2004, and more recently the capability has been expanded globally with the ABI on-board NOAA’s GOES-16 and GOES-17 satellites, and the AHI on-board JMA’s Himawari-8 and Himawari-9. At present, the NOAA and EUMETSAT operational geostationary active fire products are available based on two different algorithms: the Fire Detection and Characterization (FDC) product operating with data from GOES-16 and −17, and FRP-PIXEL active fire products from GOES, Himawari and MSG. We have conducted a comprehensive accuracy assessment of these geostationary fire products across two seasons (1 January–31 March 2020 and 1 July–30 September 2020), based on comparison to Landsat active fire detections made simultaneously (±5 minutes of geostationary overpass time) with the geostationary data. Compared to Landsat we find (i) low false alarm rates, ranging between 4%–7% (FDC) and 2%-6% (FRP-PIXEL)- depending on the season and hemispheric-disk for high confidence pixels, (ii) a reduction in this false alarm rate for FDC due to algorithm changes made since our prior (2018) validation effort (48% false alarms in summer 2018 compared to 4% in summer 2020 for high confidence pixels), and (iii) comparable active fire pixel detection rates for the FDC product (high confidence fire pixel classes only) and the matching FRP-PIXEL product (all fire pixel confidence classes). Overall, the performance of these geostationary products is shown to be strong and complementary in that the FRP-PIXEL product has fewer false alarms but a lower detection rate, whereas the FDC product detects more fire pixels but with a much higher false alarm rate.