MODIS Collection 5 Active Fire Product User's Guide Version ... - FAO

5 Validation of the MODIS Active Fire ProductsIn this section we provide a brief overview of the validation status of the MODIS active fire products.A more detailed overview may be found in the active fire section of the MODIS Land TeamValidation web site 4 .5.1 Validation Based on ASTER ImageryValidation of the Terra MODIS active fire product has primarily been performed using coincident,high resolution fire masks derived from Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and ReflectionRadiometer (ASTER) imagery. See Morisette et al. (2005a,b), Csiszar et al. (2006), and Schroederet al. (2008) for details. A very brief (though now somewhat obsolete) discussion of the generalvalidation procedure, with some early results, can be found in Justice et al. (2002). For informationabout the methodology for producing the ASTER fire masks, see Giglio et al. (2008).More recent work by Schroeder et al. has achieved Stage 3 validation of the Level 2 TerraMODIS fire product using 2500 ASTER scenes distributed globally and acquired from 2001 through2006 (Figure 10). The results of this exhaustive effort will be published in a forthcoming paper.Figure 10: Spatial coverage and distribution of 2,500 ASTER scenes (red patches) used in theStage 3 validation of MOD14. Image courtesy of Wilfrid Schroeder.5.2 Other ValidationIndependent validation of the Terra and Aqua MODIS active fire products without ASTER has beenperformed by de Klerk (2008) and Hawbaker et al. (2008). These approaches have at least twoadvantages over ASTER-based methods: 1) They can be applied to both MODIS sensors (not justthe Terra MODIS), and 2) they are not restricted to the near-nadir portion of the MODIS swath.4 http://landval.gsfc.nasa.gov/ProductStatus.php?ProductID=MOD1435