Africa Burned Area Product Generation, Quality Assessment

Africa Burned Area Product Generation, Quality Assessment and Validation - Demonstrating a Multi-Source Land Imaging (MuSLI) Landsat-8 Sentinel-2 Capability

Project Start Date

05/01/2018

Project End Date

05/01/2021

Grant Number

NNH17ZDA001N

Project Call Name

Multi-Source Land Imaging (MuSLI)

Science Theme Name

Multi-Source Land Imaging (MuSLI)

Detection and Monitoring of LCLUC

Observations and Data

Region

Solicitation

Team Members:

Person Name	Person role on project	Affiliation
David Roy	Principal Investigator	Michigan State University, East Lansing, United States
Luigi Boschetti	Co-Investigator	University of Idaho, Moscow, United States
Haiyan Huang	Co-Investigator	Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA
Shaun Robert Levick	Collaborator	Charles Darwin Univesity, Darwin, AU
Emilio Chuvieco	Collaborator	Universidad de Alcala, Alcala de Henares, ES

Abstract

We will generate a 30 m monthly burned area product for all of Africa south of the Tropic of Cancer by combination of every available Landsat-8, Sentinel-2A, and -2B acquisition for 2017, 2018 and 2019. The mapping algorithm is mature and is applied on a multi-temporal per-pixel basis. Seamless integration of the different sensor data is achieved through random forest change regression, parameterized with synthetic training data and modeling reflective wavelength change considering the different sensor spectral response functions. Temporal consistency checks are used to reduce commission errors. The data handling is based on the global Web Enabled Landsat Data code and integrating our recent research on Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 pre-processing. The burned area products will be systematically compared with a planned European funded Sentinel-2A burned area product over northern Africa, and with our coarser resolution NASA MODIS and VIIRS products, to assess their differences and at validation sites to quantify their relative accuracies. Product validation will be conducted across Africa by comparison with visually interpreted high spatial resolution data obtained from the NASA investigator commercial data archive and from PLANET following the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) validation protocol we helped to develop. A field validation campaign in Year 2 leveraging off international collaborator activities in South Africa will be undertaken. The products will be generated on NASA recommended high performance computing and will be made available from both U.S. and European portals. This proposal is timely, ambitious, and will provide transformational systematic, continental scale fire monitoring. It provides an unprecedented opportunity to support the needs of several NASA programs as well as the needs of the fire science and applications communities, and of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS). The proposed 30m continental monthly burned area product builds on our Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 data pre-processing and algorithm development under the previous NASA ROSES 2014: LCLUC MuSLI solicitation. It leverages our extensive experience, software toolkits, and existing funding, developing the NASA global WELD products, the MODIS and VIIRS burned area products, and memberships of the Landsat, MODIS, and VIIRS science teams. Collaboration with long-standing European partners will help focus and accelerate the Sentinel-2 aspects of the proposed development schedule.

Project Research Area

Project Documents

Year	Authors	Type	Title
2020	David Roy	NASA LCLUC Science Team Presentation	Africa Burned Area Product Generation with Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2; and testing the use of VHR
2019		Publications	Li, Z., Zhang, H.K., Roy, D.P., 2019, Investigation of Sentinel-2 bidirectional reflectance hot-spot sensing conditions, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 57(6), 3591 - 3598.
2019		Publications	Mathieu, R., Main, R., Roy, D.P., Naidoo, L., Yang, H., 2019, The effect of surface fire in savannah systems in the Kruger National Park (KNP), South Africa, on the backscatter of C-Band Sentinel-1 Images, Fire, 2(3), 37
2019	David Roy	NASA LCLUC Science Team Presentation	Progress on Moving Multi-Source Land Imaging of Africa Burned Area to Production
2019	David Roy Haiyan Huang	Publications	Roy, D.P., Huang, H., Boschetti, L., Giglio, L., Yan, L., Zhang, H.K., Li, Z., 2019, Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 burned area mapping - a combined sensor multi-temporal change detection approach, Remote Sensing of Environment, 231, 111254.
2018		Publications	Yan, L., Roy, D.P., Li, Z., Zhang, H.K., Huang, H., 2018, Sentinel-2A multi-temporal misregistration characterization and an orbit-based sub-pixel registration methodology, Remote Sensing of Environment, 215, 495-506.
2018		Publications	Zhang, H. K., Roy, D.P., Yan, L., Li, Z., Huang, H., Vermote, E., Skakun, S., Roger, J-C., 2018, Characterization of Sentinel-2A and Landsat-8 top of atmosphere, surface, and nadir BRDF adjusted reflectance and NDVI differences, Remote Sensing of Environment, 215, 482-494.
2018		Publications	Helder, D., Markham, B., Morfitt, R., Storey, J., Barsi, J., Gascon, F, Clerc, S., LaFrance, B., Masek, J., Roy, D.P., Lewis, A., Pahlevan, N., 2018, Observations and recommendations for the calibration of Landsat 8 OLI and Sentinel 2 MSI for improved data interoperability, Remote Sensing, 10(9), 1340.
2018		Publications	Giglio, L., Boschetti, L., Roy, D.P., Humber, M.L., Justice, C.O., 2018, The Collection 6 MODIS burned area mapping algorithm and product, Remote Sensing of Environment, 217, 72-85.
2018		Publications	Kumar S.S. and Roy D.P., 2018, Global Operational Land Imager (GOLI) Landsat-8 reflectance based active fire detection algorithm, International Journal of Digital Earth, 11(2), 154-178.