MODIS
Level 3 Monthly Tiled 500m Burned Area Product (MCD45A1)
Algorithm
The algorithm developed for the MCD45 product uses a bi-directional reflectance (BRDF) model-based change detection approach; it detects the approximate date of burning by locating the occurrence of rapid changes in daily MODIS reflectance time series. The algorithm maps the spatial extent of recent fires and not of fires that occurred in previous seasons or years. Because of the BRDF model incorporated in the algorithm, the production of one month of MCD45 requires the availability of 90 days of daily MODIS data (i.e. both the previous and the following month).
For further information, refer to the following publications:
D.P. Roy, L. Boschetti, C.O. Justice, J. Ju, The Collection 5 MODIS Burned Area Product - Global Evaluation by Comparison
with the MODIS Active Fire Product, 2008, Remote Sensing of Environment, 112, 3690-3707 (pdf)
Boschetti, L ., Roy, D. Barbosa, P., Boca, R. and Justice, C., A MODIS assessment of the summer 2007 extent burned in Greece, ,2008, International Journal of Remote Sensing, 29(8):2433-2436.(pdf)
Roy, D.P., Jin, Y., Lewis, P.E., Justice, C.O. 2005. Prototyping a global algorithm for systematic fire-affected area mapping using MODIS time series data.Remote Sensing of Environment, 97:137-162 (pdf).
MODIS Fire Products Algorithm Theoretical Background Document (ATBD) (pdf)
Characteristics of the
product
The MODIS burned area
product is a Level 3 gridded 500m product, produced in the standard
MODIS Land tile format in sinusoidal projection. Each tile has fixed
earth-location, covering an area of approximately 1200 x 1200 km (10° x
10° at the equator). The product defines for each 500m pixel the
approximate day of burning. It is a monthly product which is obtained
processing combined MODIS-TERRA and MODIS-AQUA 500m land surface
reflectance data.
Each product tile
contains the following components:
Per-pixel burning
information
the approximate day
of burning (1-366) or 0 (no burning detected)
codes to indicate no
decision due to persistent missing, bad quality or cloudy data.
QA information.
Mandatory and
product-specific metadata
Geotiff Files
A user-friendly geotiff version of the MCD45 product is derived from the standard MCD45A1 hdf version by University of Maryland. The geotiffs are reprojected in Plate-Carrée projection and cover a set of sub-continental windows. For all the details about the coverage of the windows, as well as the detailed description of the format, please refer to the user guide.
Sample results
First Collection 5 MODIS Burned Area global composite
Global composite of November 2000 Burned Areas. The rainbow colors (blue to red) indicate the approximate day of burning in November, black indicates no burning, white indicates no decision because of persistent cloud cover or missing data, and grey indicates no burning and snow detected. Click on the image to open a higher resolution version (20 km pixels, median product values).
Regional Collection 4 Results
The following image is a
mosaic of the MODIS 500m burned area product using MODIS Collection 4
data for the whole sub-equatorial Africa, overlaid on true color mosaic
of MODIS bands 1,4 and 3. The different colors indicate the approximate
day of burning detected between August and October 2000 (click on the
image to open a full resolution version).
The following image shows
in detail the results over a region extending approximately between 0°E
and 40°E in longitude and between 5°S and 25°S in latitude (click on the
image to open a full resolution version).
The
following figure is a mosaic of the MCD45 product over Australia,
showing burned areas detected in September and October 2002 (click on the image to open a full
resolution version).
The following animation illustrates the MODIS 500m burned area product for a
750km x 300km region of southern Africa, 2000 produced using MODIS Collection
4 data. This region falls within MODIS tile h20v10 to the north east of the
Okavango Delta, Botswana. The different colors indicate the approximate day of
burning detected over a 56 day period, black indicates no burning detected and white
indicates no decision. The large white region in the North East is Lake
Kariba on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border.
MODIS burned area product, Quick Time Movie (3.4MB)
(Click image to view movie)
The next two animations illustrate the MODIS 500m burned area product and the MODIS
surface reflectance data used to make the burned area product. A 350km x 300km subregion
for the 56 days is shown.
The first animation shows the MODIS surface reflectance sensed in bands 1, 4 and 3.
These bands approximately illustrate the surface sensed by the human eye from space.
The progression of several extensive burns is evident. Cloudy and bad quality MODIS
surface reflectance data that are rejected by the MODIS burned area algorithm are not
illustrated. Residual thin cirrus and small cumulus clouds and their shadows are
apparent on several days.
MODIS 500m surface reflectance (bands 1, 4 & 3) and burned area product, Quick Time Movie (5.4MB)
The second animation shows the MODIS land surface reflectance sensed in bands
6, 5 and 2 – these are some of the bands used by the MODIS burned area algorithm
as they discriminate burned from unburned surfaces much better than bands 1, 4 and 3.
The striping evident in these bands is due to a 2000 MODIS data calibration problem.
MODIS 500m surface reflectance (bands 6, 5 & 2) and burned area product, Quick Time Movie (6.7MB)
The animations illustrate some of the issues mapping burned areas using an
operational algorithm. They illustrate that the MODIS burned area product maps
both the location and approximate day of burning.
QuickTime for Mac and Windows machines is available from Apple at http://www.apple.com/quicktime. Please use the slider at the bottom of the movie viewer.
Sample Dataset for 3D visualization in NASA World Wind
The global mosaic of burned areas for November 2000 is available for visualisation in the 3-dimensional World Wind virtual globe.
World Wind was developed by NASA Ames Research Centre, and is distributed as open source software that you can install on a Windows personal computer.
Instuctions on how to obtain World Wind and the MODIS burned area product visualization imagery :
For evey month of 2001, a self extracting .exe file contaning the data and an ancillary .xml file are available.
Save on you hard disk the .exe file and double click on it to uncompress. By default, it will uncompress it into the /Data/MCD45 subdirectory under the WorldWind installation directory (whose default location is "C: /programs/NASA/WorldWind1.4").
After uncompressing the .exe file, the data should be contained in the directory "C:/programs/NASA/WorldWind1.4/Data/MCD45/MCD45200DDD", where DDD is the julian date of the beginning of each month, and it will have four subdirectories: "0", "1", "2", "3".
Save the corresponding .xml file in the /Config/Earth subdirectory of the WorldWind root directory.
Open WorldWind and select "Layer Manager" from the "View" menu; a list of layers will appear on the left side of the main WorldWind window.
In World Wind Click on the box next to MCD45 to activate the burned area layer.
More information on the visualization of the MCD45 product in WorldWind is contained in the paper:
Boschetti, L ., Roy, D. and Justice, C., Using NASA's World Wind Virtual Globe for Interactive Visualization of the Global MODIS Burned Area Product, 2008, International Journal of Remote Sensing, 29(11)3067-3072.(pdf)
Sample Videos of MODIS burned areas in World Wind:
if the videos do not load properly, download the latest version of Adobe Flash Player from here
All MODIS products are available free of charge. The MODIS Burned Area Product is available for ordering from the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP-DAAC) using the EOS Data Gateway web interface located at: http://wist.echo.nasa.gov
Additionally, an ftp server is maintained by the University of Maryland, mostly to provide support to the science users who need to download systematically large volumes of data.
Downloading the product via FTP
The MODIS burned area product is available for download via ftp from the website http://modis-fire.umd.edu/.
We request users to fill in a user online form for statistical purposes and in order to obtain username and password for the server. The form is available under http://modis-fire.umd.edu/form.asp
You are asked to enter your name, affiliation and a short description of the intended use of the product. A username and password is send to your given e-mail address. Once you have received your username and password you can start retrieving the data either in HDF or Geotiff format.
For downloading the data via FTP you can either use your current web browser such as the FTP extension of Firefox or Internet Explorer. However we recommend using special FTP software for downloading large amounts of data. You can use freely available software such as FileZillaClient or SmartFTP, which has the advantage that you can schedule your download to start at a later time and if you download multiple sources, it will try to download different portions from them to speed up. https://www.ohloh.net/p/filezilla/download?filename=FileZilla_3.2.7.1_win32-setup.exe http://www.smartftp.com/
Whichever program you will use for data download you will need to connect to the given ftp site that is: ftp://ba1.geog.umd.edu
Data Structure of the FTP server
Both data sets HDF and geotiffs are available on the same FTP server. However, the subdirectory structure is different and is described in the following paragraphs.
a) HDF Files
The file system on the ftp server is structured to organize the data hierarchically by year and by month. All the data from the same month is located in a directory identified by the year and month as:
/HDF/YYYY/DDD/
where:
YYYY is the year
DDD is the julian day of the beginning of the month
For example, the directory /HDF/2001/152 contains all the tiles (named with the convention explained in the user guide in section 3.1 of the user guide) of the product for June 2001.
B) GEOTIFF files
The file system on the ftp server is structured to organize the data hierarchically by window, and then by year. All the data for the same window from the same year is located in a directory identified as:
/TIF/WinXX/YYYY/
where:
XX is the number of the window (User Guide, figure 2)
YYYY is the year
For example, the directory /TIF/Win01/2001 contains all the months of 2001 for window 01 (Alaska).
Boschetti, L ., Roy, D. Barbosa, P., Boca, R. and Justice, C., A MODIS assessment of the summer 2007 extent burned in Greece,2008, International Journal of Remote Sensing, 29(8):2433-2436.(pdf)
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