The Full Picture

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Global Observation of Forest and Land

Cover Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD): monitoring

and early warning systems for

wildland fire disaster reduction

William J. de Groot, Tim J. Lynham, Michael A. Brady, Natural Resources Canada;

Ivan A. Csiszar, Diane Davies, Christopher O. Justice, University of Maryland;

Elaine M. Prins, University of Wisconsin;

Johann G. Goldammer, Global Fire Monitoring Center

ire is an increasingly prevalent disturbance on the global

landscape with several hundred million hectares of vegeta-

tion being burnt every year. Wildland fires (including forest

and land fires) occur annually in all vegetation zones, and most

global fire is unmonitored and undocumented. Increasing trends

in wildland fire activity have been reported in many global regions

during the past one or two decades. Wildland fires can have many

serious negative impacts on human safety,

health,

regional

economies,

global climate change,

and fire-sensitive ecosystems.

For all of these reasons, uncontrolled wildland fire can have disas-

trous effects with local to global impacts. In general, jurisdictions

with the least capacity to cope with increasing wildfire threat,

such as countries with developing economies, are at greater risk

from wildfire disaster and its damaging impacts.

The overall damage by uncontrolled wildfires can be mitigated, and

sometimes prevented, through fire management activities including

fire prevention (e.g. road closures, media information, fire restric-

tions), pre-positioning and alert scheduling of suppression resources,

detection planning, and the use of fire to reduce flammable fuel load.

Fire management programmes are highly dependent on fire, weather,

and fuels information. These data are used in operational decision-

making to 1) establish the extent and activity of current ongoing

fires, and 2) predict future fire occurrence and fire behaviour. Fire

management occurs at many scales, from the local community to

national and international levels. Data requirements range from

simple to very complex, generally in proportion to the area of juris-

diction. Fuels (or vegetation) data are basically static for fire

management timescales, but fire and weather data are highly vari-

able over short (hourly) time periods. Therefore, these data require

rapid transmission. Supplying information to the fire management

community at national and international levels is very demanding

because the datasets are very large and time-sensitive.

The international panel for Global Observation of Forest and Land

Cover Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD) carries out several activities to link

ground-based and satellite data collection networks in support of

global near-real time wildland fire monitoring and early

warning. The activities are included in the work of the

Group on Earth Observations (GEO). Specifically, work

plan task DI-06-13 includes the development of a glob-

ally coordinated early warning system for vegetation fires

(wildland fires), including the development of improved

information products and risk assessment models.

Global near-real time wildland fire monitoring

Polar orbiting systems

GOFC-GOLD-Fire programme is aimed at establishing

operational polar orbiters with fire monitoring capabil-

ity by providing operational moderate resolution

long-term global fire products and enhanced regional

products.

The polar systems with full operational status are the

NOAA Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites (POES)

and the EUMETSAT Polar System (EPS), operating

Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR).

Many of the existing national or regional operational

systems for detecting active fires rely on AVHRR data

downloaded from direct readout stations. The NASA

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer

(MODIS) research instrument has demonstrated the

value that improved spatial resolution, radiometric cali-

bration, geolocation accuracy, and an extended suite of

spectral bands can bring to fire remote sensing.

Data

from the ESA (Advanced) Along-Track Scanning

Radiometer ((A)ATSR) have been processed to produce

global compilations of night time active fire and burn

scars.

The US Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite

Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS)

can detect fires at night via low light imaging in the

visible wavelength region.

GOFC-GOLD-Fire

programme is currently focusing on ensuring fire detec-

tion capabilities from future systems, such as

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