Inter-comparison of Himawari-8 AHI fire surveillance data with MODIS and VIIRS fire products

Satellite remote sensing is regularly used for wildfire detection, fire severity mapping and burned area mapping. MODIS and VIIRS active fire products area commonly used for wildfire monitoring. However the low temporal resolution of four times daily and twice daily, limits the applications in terms of wildfire monitoring. Traditionally geostationary satellites provide high temporal resolution data. But have a spatial resolution inadequate for fire detection and surveillance. Himawari-8 is a new geo-stationary weather satellite launched in October 2015 by Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). On board is the AHI (Advance Himawari Imager) 16 channel mutlispectral sensor with 2km middle infrared(MIR) and thermal infrared (TIR). AHI provides high temporal data capturing the full disk every 10 minutes, which covers the East Asia region. High temporal resolution makes it ideal for wildfire monitoring applications. Thus it is important to understand the capabilities of AHI in-terms of active fire detection. This paper presents an inter-comparison with other existing fire products, Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) with respectively 1km and 375m spatial resolution active fire products. MODIS active fire algorithm "Version 4" which is a bi-spectral fire detection algorithm is adopted for AHI sensor. Initial results show AHI was able to detect large fires with a high detection rate. The results also show possible applications of AHI for wildfire detection and tracking. Making way for near real-time monitoring of large fires.