VIIRS Active Fire EDR: Which fire locations are valid?

VIIRS Environmental Data Records
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gumley
Posts: 37
Joined: Thu Feb 18, 2010 2:36 pm

VIIRS Active Fire EDR: Which fire locations are valid?

Post by gumley »

The VIIRS Active Fire EDR contains a list of latitude and longitude values where a fire *may* have occurred. However as several CSPP users have reported to us, not all the fire locations are actually valid. In some cases fires are reported in regions where there is no valid data in the corresponding SDR files (e.g., in an area where an obvious reception dropout occurred).

When reading the VIIRS Active Fire product files, it is important to pay attention to the data quality flags. Here is one way to filter the reported fire locations (this method is used in the IDL code accompanying the test data for the CSPP VIIRS EDR v1.0 release).

For each AVAFO product file:

1. Read the contents of the following HDF5 datasets (they should have identical dimensions):
lat => 'All_Data/VIIRS-AF-EDR_All/Latitude/Latitude_0'
lon => 'All_Data/VIIRS-AF-EDR_All/Longitude/Longitude_0'
quality => 'All_Data/VIIRS-AF-EDR_All/QF4_VIIRSAFARP/QF4_VIIRSAFARP_0'

2. Extract the lat/lon values where the quality value is 10 or higher.

This should filter out most of the invalid fire locations.

Cheers,
Liam.
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