7th Workshop on Forest Fire Management - EARSeL, European ...

Abstract: Long Term Data Record (LTDR) 5 km AVHRR data was used to generate
burned area in Western Canada and compared to Local Area Coverage
(LAC) 1.1 km and Pathfinder 8 km dataset (PAL) from 1984 to 1999. The
algorithm uses a Bayesian Network (naive Bayes) trained with LAC burned
area. The results matched very well LAC and improved the results over PAL.
Additional research is needed to extrapolate results to other boreal areas,
such as Siberia, where LTDR 5 km exists since 1981, but LAC 1.1 km is only
available since the 90s.
1 - Introduction
Boreal forests contribute to store carbon that is released to the atmosphere
as a consequence of wildfires. Due to the slow vegetation recovery process,
the increase in boreal forest burning can modify the carbon balance significantly
(Balshi et al., 2009). Recently the LTDR project, funded by NASA,
created a global daily dataset from the AVHRR Global Area Coverage (GAC)
at 5 km (Nagol et al., 2009; Pedelty et al., 2007) from 1981 to 2006. LTDR
has improved atmospheric correction and inter-calibration between sensors.
2 - Methods
BURNED AREA DATA TIME SERIES FROM LTDR DATASET
FOR CANADA (1981-2000)
J.A. Moreno Ruiz1, 2 D. Riaño1, 3 , A. Alonso-Benito4 ,
N.H.F. French5 & S.L. Ustin1 1 CSTARS, University of California, 250-N, The Barn, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616-8617, USA
2 Universidad de Almería, Almería, Spain
3 Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC, Madrid, Spain
4 Universidad de La Laguna, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
5 MTRI, Michigan Technological University, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
jamoreno@ual.es; driano@cstars.ucdavis.edu; asaloben@gmail.com;
nhfrench@mtu.edu; slustin@ucdavis.edu
LTDR dataset version 2 has been available since October 15th, 2007
(http://ltdr.nascom.nasa.gov/ltdr/productSearch.html, last accessed
07/06/2009). A 10 day composite from daily data was built from 1984 to
1999 with the minimum albedo criterion. We selected Chuvieco et al.
(2008) study site in Western Canada (UL: 62º16’N,-122º20’E; LR: 53ºN,-
96º30’E), where the authors generated burned area maps.
The algorithm to calculate burned area from LTDR was trained with the
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