NASA ARSET Post-Fire Imagery and Smoke Monitoring

0:00 Speaker 1: Welcome everyone to our r SET training series. Introduction to Advanced NASA Earth Observations and Tools for active fires, smoke and post fire monitoring. Today's part one of our training series, post Fire Imagery and Smoke Monitoring. My name is Brock Blevins. I'm a training coordinator for the r SET program, and I'll be your host for this training series. But before we begin today's training, a few quick words about the art SET program. NASA Applied Remote Sensing Training or our SET program, provides cost free training on the use of remote sensing observations, analysis methods, and tools.

0:38 Speaker 1: We provide training in several thematic areas agriculture, climate and resilience, disasters, eco conservation, health, inner quality, water resources, and such as the training here today, wildline fires. Our SET provides trainings both online or in person. Our online trainings are delivered in two formats, live instructor lead like today's training, or asynchronous in self paced like NASA's free and accessible data. All of our trainings are offered at no cost. We try to offer trainings in more than one language whenever we can, and we only use no cost in open source software and data.

1:18 Speaker 1: We offer our trainings at a range of levels, so you can find a training series that fits your level of experience and need. Please visit our website to learn more.

1:29 Speaker 1: We'll begin today's session by giving an overview of the training series Advanced NASA Earth Observations and Tools for active fire, smoke and post fire monitoring. The system and routine monitoring of active fires, smoke transport, and post fire burned severity is essential for understanding both the immediate as well as the long term impacts of fire on ecosystems, air quality, and human infrastructure. Satellite observations provide continuous and often global data that allow for early detection of new fire ignitions, the tracking of fire progression, and monitoring of smoke transport.

2:08 Speaker 1: These data can help guide emergency responses, reducing risk to communities. Post fire burned area and burn severity maps can be used for damage assessment, evaluation of vegetation loss, and debris flow risk assessment. This information can help scientists and land managers support recovery efforts. Overall, Satellite monitoring is a key tool for both immediate fire response and long term environmental management, and here are training learning objectives for the series. By the end of the training Participants will be able to access relevant post fire imagery in the firm's burned area mode to assess burned area burn severity and other factors.

2:50 Speaker 1: Identify and track wildfire smoke over time using corrective reflectantce OMPs, aerosol index and PYROCB layers available in the firm's smoke aerosols, and also understand when to use the PYROCB layer. Use relevant data and firms to identify static thermal anomalies associated with industrial and natural sources that are not vegetation fires, and use Jupiter notebooks to assess and visualize firms data for different case studies. A prerequisite for this course, we recommend that you take our Fundamentals or Remote Sensing to familiarize yourself with the terminology and concepts you might hear in today's training or have equal knowledge coming in.

3:36 Speaker 1: This training also builds under previous ARSET training introduction to NASA Earth Observations and tools for wildfire monitoring and management. This training gave an overview of the NASA Fire Information and Resource Management System or firms the modules available in firms. We explored the data as well as the characteristics of available satellite based active fire detection and provide a demonstrations on how to query, access, and visualize the data in GIS and other applications. This training will also discuss burned area and indices for burned severity, so for more information on those, we recommend reviewing our previous training spectral indices for land and aquatic applications.

4:19 Speaker 1: But here's our training outline. In Part one today we'll be covering post fire imagery and smoke monitoring, and then in Part two a week from today, on November nineteenth, we'll be looking at data analysis and visualization. There'll be one homework associated with this training and it will be available on November nineteenth, on the day of our last session, and it will be due two weeks from there, due to November three, and that will be posted on the training web page. A certificate of completion will be awarded to those who attend all live sessions and complete the homework.

4:51 Speaker 1: Assignment be fort December third. So let's start Part one our Part one trainers. Today, we're lucky to have Jenny Houston, she is the Lance manager and Diane Davies, who is the Lance Operations manager, and the objectives for the part today, participants will be able to recognize the strengths and limitations of available post fire indices and imagery products in the burned area mode. Access available indices and imagery products and firms to assess burned area and fire damage severity, burned area recovery status, and other land cover characteristics.

5:30 Speaker 1: Recognize the strengths and limitations of available smoke and aerosol data products and firms, and this will be used for monitoring smoke extent and tracking progression. And then how to access available satellite data products and firms that can be used to track the extent and progression of smoke. This as a reminder of some of the key concepts will be using during today's session. If you're completely unfamiliar with these, you can refer back to our recommended for requisites. One is true color imagery is used to show an image as a human eye would see it.

6:03 Speaker 1: It uses red, green, and blue wavelengths to represent the corresponding colors in the real world. False color imagery is created by assigning wavelengths invisible to the human eye, such as infrared, the colors like red, green, and blue. False color imagery is used to enhance surface features like the presence of vegetation or a burn scar. A spectral index combines different wavelengths of light highlight specific features on the earth surface or atmosphere. Different indices can give information on the health of vegetation, water quality, burn severity, the presence of aerosols, and more.

6:42 Speaker 1: Examples of these referred to in Part one are the normalized burn ratio or NBR, the normalized difference of vegetation index, and DVII, an aerosol index.

6:56 Speaker 1: How to ask questions. Please put your questions in the question spots and we'll address them at the end of this training. Feel free to answer your questions as we go. We'll try to get to all the questions during the Q and A session After the training, the remainder of the questions will be answered in the Q and A document, which we posted the training's webpage about a week after the training. So now I will hand this off to Jenny Houston, who will start us with burned area mode in firms.

7:25 Speaker 2: Thank you, Jenny, Okay, great, welcome to this demonstration.

7:33 Speaker 3: Using firms to map the monitor burned area and post via dynamics. The demos will provide an overview of the firms burned area interface and global burned area products and an overview of the vegetation in disease and other imagery available to analyze burned area and post via dynamics through a particular area of interest. By the end of the session, you should be able to assess burned area globally using the monthly annual burned area products available for Modus and VIAS, and be able to analyze burned area and post biodynamics for a particular area of interest using vegetation in disease and other imagery from the harmonized lansat Sentinel datester.

8:26 Speaker 3: There are two global burned area products that can be accessed through the burned Airy mode as well as the Advanced mode, which you can access here. There is the NASA Modus Monthly Burned Area product as well as the NASA VIA's Monthly burned Area product. The MODUS burned Area product is generated using Modus.

8:50 Speaker 2: Terror as well as Modus and AQUA.

8:52 Speaker 3: The VIA's product is generated using vias aboard SMPP. The MODE product is available from late two thousand and the VIA's product is available from early twenty twelve. If I change this to twenty twenty five, you will notice that the products are available for the Modus product as well as the VIA's product through August of this year, and that is because the products are based on a burned area algorithm that uses a time series of reflectance imagery to identify abrupt changes in reflectance. The algorithm then checks for the persistence of this abrupt change and then uses a series of active fire detections to double check these changes resulted from wildfires.

9:54 Speaker 3: This process can result in a lack of anywhere from two to four months.

10:02 Speaker 2: Now.

10:02 Speaker 3: As they are both based on the same algorithm, the VIAS uses a modified version of the Modus burnd Airy algorithm. This ensures that the VIA's product will provide continuity to the Modus product once Terra and Aqua, which both carry the most instrument, are decommissioned, and both products also have the same spatial resolution five hundred meters. Other options to note on the interfaces. Again, the interfaces are identical. There is the monthly product that is available and then there is also an annual cumulative product.

10:45 Speaker 3: The monthly product can be viewed for one, two or three years simultaneously. For example, you can change the dates to any year of interest and then that you will pop up at which point you can manipulate which of the layers, which of the months you would like to view based on your area of interest. You can change the colors here, and you can change the opacity of a particular month. Using this tool, you can also decide whether you want the months filled or would like to use an outline instead. And then there is the annual cumulative product.

11:33 Speaker 3: And again you can look at this for one, two or three years simultaneously.

11:43 Speaker 2: Okay, so that's the interface.

11:46 Speaker 3: And now we're actually looking at the pans and Now region in South America. It is the world's largest wetland and it is located in this area of Brazil, Bolivia and Perle. Why so all throughout this area here that pant and I generally experiences a dry season between June and October, and in twenty twenty three and twenty four the region actually saw a significant rout and a.

12:17 Speaker 2: Large amount of area burned.

12:20 Speaker 3: We are actually looking at let me just collapse these down for a moment. We're actually looking at a modus board APPUA false color composite produced using Band seven two and one, and burned area in this composite shows up as a brick red color. You can also see out of wildfires and smoke emanating from the wildfires in these areas. Here we can now explore when the area is burned using the burned area product. Let me collapse a couple of layers and then open up the Modus burned airy product. So I changed this to twenty twenty four, and now I can look at the areas that burned and were mapped by the modest product in May, in June, in July, and in August twenty twenty four.

13:23 Speaker 3: As I mentioned, you can change the color of individual months, and so we're going to change June to more of an orange color because the green does not really stand out of the false color composite.

13:42 Speaker 2: And if we.

13:45 Speaker 3: Turn each of these layers off, you can actually see the burned area that was mapped underneath the burned area product generated by motors.

14:00 Speaker 2: Now, if we fast.

14:01 Speaker 3: Forward to the end of September and pop that on, we can see that even more area has burned again. There is smoke from some of their active fires. And this is all of the area that was burned from the end of August to the end of September. And if you wanted to compare the Modus and Vius burned airy product. You pop down to the VIA's product and select the same yeah, twenty twenty four, and we will compare August. Now we're actually looking at August twenty twenty four of Modus and August twenty twenty four of Vias.

14:50 Speaker 2: And let me change the core of.

14:52 Speaker 3: The VIA's product to the yellow so that we can.

14:59 Speaker 2: Now both products.

15:02 Speaker 3: Vias is in yellow, and we can actually see how well the products generally correspond to each other, even though the products are from two different sensors Modus and Vias, and these have different sensor characteristics. And if I zoom in and now pick up the capacity tool and slide back and forth, we can see how well the products overlap and any small differences that there may be.

15:37 Speaker 2: If that's an.

15:38 Speaker 3: Average, the annual global difference between the two products is two to six percent. And this is all explained and documented in a recent paper by jiglio Out that is in the references section. In this section, we're exploring other data layers that can be helpful in assessing burned area, post fire dynamics, etc. We're using the firm's US Canada, and we're going to explore the harmonized lance that sentinel to imagery drop down right here using the Mosquito Fire in California. This was the largest fir in California in twenty twenty two.

16:22 Speaker 3: It started in September the sixth. It burned in two counties, Place and Eldorado. And just to orientate a little bit to the east is Lake Tahoe on the border of California and Nevada. This is an older burn. This is the Calder Fire burn from twenty twenty one, and then over to the west are.

16:48 Speaker 2: Irrigated areas. We're actually looking at a fast color.

16:55 Speaker 3: Composite from two days into the fire on September the eighth. This particular image was generated mainly using oli aboard lands at eight and nine, and you can see which source of data is providing.

17:18 Speaker 2: The image by clicking these on and off.

17:23 Speaker 3: And if we zoom in a little bit, you can see this is the area that has already burned in brick red and there are active firefronts on multiple sides of the fire and lots of smoke emanating out. We can also make use of the active fire detections to look at the progression of the fire. So if we hop forward to September the twelfth, and look at a week's worth of active fire detections. And for this we'll use their active fire detections from Veers on Noah twenty

18:01 Speaker 3: and we'll just give it a moment to load. Okay, Now we're looking at all the active fire detections over the first seven days, so the sick through the twelve. I have this set the display set to time based, and so we're actually looking at these based on when they were detected. So orange and red are the most recent. And again this is days since detection, all right, So we have made use of the PHOS color imagery as well as the active fire detections to look at the onset and progression of the fire over the first week and to help users assess areas that have been burned.

18:49 Speaker 3: We've recently incorporated a number of vegetation industries from the HLS data set that are available under the HLS Imagery drop down, which I'm showing over on the right. So let's fast forward to further into the fire. So on the twenty fifth of September, we're now looking at a false color composite from the twenty fifth of September, and if I change this to one day and give it a moment to load. Let me zoom in to the area. And so this is the area that has burned that appears in brick red in this false color composite.

19:34 Speaker 3: And now we're going to make use of the normalized burn ratio or NBR. So let me pop that on. And the NBR from last OLI is calculated using infrared and shortwave infrared bands. That's BANS five and then BANS seven of the short wave infrared, and the NBR can be useful firstly in mapping the extent of the burnt area. In this purple shows vegetated areas and shades of orange show burned areas. Secondly, the NBER can help in assessing burned severity. Darker orange areas generally indicate while severe burning, somewhat damage to vegetation, increased bare or exposed ground, presence.

20:29 Speaker 2: Of ash, etc.

20:31 Speaker 3: But it's important to note that the NBR can be impacted by terrain effects, so things such as steep terrain, shadow, et cetera, of which there was a lot in this area. And then, as I mentioned, increasing shades of purple generally indicate healthy vegetation or only lightly burnt areas.

20:53 Speaker 2: The third way that.

20:54 Speaker 3: The NBR can be helpful is in planning vegetation recovery and post fire response activities.

21:02 Speaker 2: All right, so keeping this.

21:04 Speaker 3: Image in mind, let me now change the date to three years later on. So three years post fire, and there was actually a good image available on the twenty fourth of September. Okay, So now we can see more shades of purple, indicative of recovering vegetation and undamaged or healthy vegetation, and lessening shades of orange.

21:44 Speaker 2: Member there was a lot of orange in this.

21:47 Speaker 3: Area, and that orange is indicative of damage to vegetation, burned severity, et cetera. And if we pop on the false color composite, we've seen more shades of green, which is indicative of the vegetation recovery. And I have loaded up the image that was collected after the first several days of the fire, and all of this is burned area throughout here. And then this for comparison three years later on, so we can look at two snapshots now the freshly burned and then three years after and with this we can start to assess the magnitude of change that has occurred in the recovery.

22:47 Speaker 2: Of vegetation at the time.

22:49 Speaker 3: In addition to the normalized burn ratio, we also have available the normalized difference Vegetation index or NDBI, the normalized difference Oisteri index, and then the normalized burn ratio two and each of these can be explored after the webinar using the information tool at the bottom of the interface. I wanted to highlight that all of the bands for both Sentinel as well as landsacked, so the ten lancet bands and the twelve cent bands are available so that you can generate your own customized bound combination using.

23:35 Speaker 2: The bands that are available.

23:41 Speaker 3: You can also download the Modus and Beers Burned Area products for using a GIS. For example, you can navigate to the page using the downloads option here, or you can access it over on the left via the download Archived Data.

23:59 Speaker 2: From this drop down.

24:01 Speaker 3: The files are available in HGF, GOTIV or SHAPEFE format, and download instructions of detailed in the user guide. So the Modus user guide is here. In the vis user guide is listed here. There's also additional downloading guidance noted at the bottom of the page here.

24:27 Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Jenny for your demonstration on the burned area monitoring and post fire dynamics. And now I'll send this off to Diane Davies who will talk about the Smoke and Airsols mode infirms. After a little bit of background information, Diane will demonstrate an overview of the smoke Aerosols mode infirms as well as tracking smoke and aerosols using the OPS aerosol indices and corrective reflectance imagery. Thank you, Diane.

24:58 Speaker 4: Great Well, welcome to this demonstration on using NASA firms to monitor smoke and aerosols. By the end of this session, you should know how to use ferms to track smoke from routine fire events all the way up to extreme pyrocumulo nimbus or fire induced events that can inject smoke into the atmosphere. So let's get started first. I wanted to just establish our foundation that when we talk about aerosols, we're referring to tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere and these come in many forms. We have natural aerosols like sea salt from motion, spray, dust from deserts, pollen from plants, and volcanic ash.

25:40 Speaker 4: We have human generated aerosols from vehicle emissions and industrial pollution, and then we have fire generated aerosols and this is where smoke fits in. So a key concept from this is that smoke is simply a type of aerosol. It's made up of tiny particles from burning vegetation. Because it's suspended in the atmosphere, we can track it using satellite instruments and that's what makes firms so useful for smoke monitoring. Why does this matter? It matters because smoke doesn't just stay local. These particles can travel hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from their source, affecting air quality far from the original fires.

26:22 Speaker 4: So understanding smoke as an aerosol helps us use the right tools to track its movement. So what tools does firms give us for tracking aerosols. Well, we're going to be looking at the smoke and aerosols mode, and I think there are three main data sets that are extremely useful. First, we have visual detection through corrected reflectance imagery, So firms through NASA Gibbs provides true color imagery from multiple satellites. So we've got the Modus instruments on board Terinaqua and the vea's instruments on SUMI MPP Noah twenty and No.

26:59 Speaker 4: Twenty one, and this imagery shows us what the Earth looks like from space as our eyes would see it, making smoke plumes look clearly visible against the landscape. I should just note that in the advanced tab of firms, which I'll come too later. We also have the harmonized Lancet Sentinel imagery, which has a thirty meter resolution, but it's only available two to four days after satellite overpass, and I know that's been covered in some of the other training sessions. So in addition to the visual detection, we need quantitative measurements, and that's where the OMPs Aerosol Index products come.

27:37 Speaker 4: In OMPs or the Ozone Mapping and Profile A suite was originally designed to measure ozone, but it excels in detecting aerosols In firms.

27:48 Speaker 5: We have two OMPs Aerosol.

27:50 Speaker 4: Index layers, and we'll discuss those in a moment. But I just want to mention active fires because, as I mentioned earlier, smoke is just one type of aerosol, and so adding in the active fires helps us distinguish what sort of aerosol we're looking at and make us more confident that we're looking at smoke as opposed to dust, for example, and in my example we'll look at both smoke and dust. So I mentioned that firms actually provides two related OMPs aerosol index products. It's actually the same index and the value is related to both the thickness and the height of the atmospheric aerosol layer, but they have different values, so understanding when to use each one is key to successful smoke monitoring.

28:37 Speaker 4: The standard OMPs aerosol index has ranged from zero to five, and this works perfectly for most smoke and dust events. Values above five are actually filtered out of this product because they're considered too extreme for routine monitoring. But what happens when we have extreme fire events, Well, that's where the pyrocumulin nimbus or PYROCB layer comes in. And this has arranged from five to fifty and removes all that high value screening and is useful for identifying fires with dense smoke blooms.

29:07 Speaker 4: And it has effectively been used to track these pyrocumulum nimbus clouds or thunderstorms generated by wildfires, and so it's useful to know when to switch between these two layers. We generally start with the standard product for routine monitoring and switch to the PYROCB layer when you're dealing with extreme fire events or when you see gaps in the standard product. So let's just spend a moment looking at what these numbers mean and the resolution of the data. Okay, so this is very approximate, but generally for the standard once cerosol index values from zero to one indicate clear or minimal aerosol conditions.

29:48 Speaker 4: Values from one to three show light smoke or dust. Three to five indicate moderate smoke levels and is an important threshold that when you see aerosol index values of five, that indicates heavy aerosol conditions that can reduce visibility and impact human health. For the PYROCB layer, values above five indicate dense smoke that's probably reached higher in the troposphere. I should point out that there's a bit of variation between the OMPs aerosol index B products between SUMIMPP and NORAH twenty.

30:22 Speaker 4: This should be rectified in the future, but for now, values above seven from SUMIMPP and values above ten from No. Twenty suggest a likely PYROCB event. Under Values from twenty to fifty indicate extreme PIROCB events where smoke has likely been injected into the stratosphere, so temporarily we get daily coverage with near real time observation within about three hours of satellite overpass. This global daily coverage is what makes OMPs so valuable for tracking smoke transport over long distances.

30:59 Speaker 4: In terms of the resolution, the spatial resolution OMPs Aerosol Index from SUMIMPP has a spatial resolution of fifty by fifty kilometers. The newer NOAH twenty and no twenty one satellites actually provide higher spatial resolution for the OMPs aerosol index and ultimately this will give us more detail in smoke plumes. But currently firms displays both the aerosol indices from SUMI MPP and NOAH twenty at a resolution of fifty by fifty kilometers. In the near future, we plan to enhance the resolution of the NOA twenty AMPS data to twelve x seventeen kilometers and add in the OMPs aerosol index data from NOAH twenty one, which will have a ten x ten kilometer resolution.

31:48 Speaker 4: And this is what that will look like.

31:55 Speaker 4: So I'm just going to switch out here. So now let's see this in action with the real world example, I'm going to walk you through the Canadian wildfire events that occurred in May twenty twenty five. So when you first go into firms, you'll be in the basic mode. You can click on these horizontal lines at the top to go into the smoke and aerosols mode. And here I'm going to put on the corrected reflectance imagery from Noah twenty one, and I'm going to zoom into I've already set the date here to May twenty fourth, twenty twenty five, and now I'm going to put on the active fires.

32:39 Speaker 4: I'm going to put on the fires for Veer's Noah twenty one, so they're coincident with the imagery. And you can start to see here that we can see some smoke plumes, so these are milky white against the landscape, and that's exactly how it would look to your eyes if you're viewing it from space, and you can see some cloud cover here to the left, and if I zoom out a little bit, you can also see there's snow to the north, and there's ice in the Hudson Bay. So sometimes it can be a bit challenging to distinguish between clouds and smoke, and so that's why the fire active fire detections are very useful to help us to be sure that it is smoke.

33:26 Speaker 4: And now we're going to add in the OMPs aerosol index layer, and here you can start to see that we've got values in the probably in the two to four range. If you want to look at the actual values, you can click on this opacity button here and you can change the value. So if you just wanted to look at values from two, you can change it here almost their.

33:54 Speaker 5: And there you are.

33:56 Speaker 4: You can also if you want to be able to see through the cloud as well, you can change the opacity so sorry, if you want to see through the aerosol index, you can change.

34:05 Speaker 5: The opacity here. So that's quite a useful tip.

34:09 Speaker 4: So this shows us where the smoke is, and the aerosol index starts to give us an idea of how dense the smoke is, and in this case, it's not very dense.

34:17 Speaker 5: But as we progress through the.

34:19 Speaker 4: Dates, you can see that the aerosol index values are getting higher and the smoke plume is getting larger and denser. So I'm going to scroll through a little bit more.

34:34 Speaker 4: All right, Now, WA's what happens if I put on the pyrocumulo nimbus layer. You can see that we now have So I change this to blue to make it really stand out. But again there's a functionality here. This is the default. You can switch at to whatever color you like for your preference. But you can start to see that the smoke is being lofted high in to the troubosphere and it's starting to transport well beyond the boundaries of Canada. So what I want to do now is I just want to switch across and show you an animation of this smoke plume.

35:17 Speaker 5: You can see.

35:19 Speaker 4: I'm going to put it onto repeat actually, so that you can see it a couple of times.

35:25 Speaker 2: So here we are.

35:25 Speaker 4: We've got if you can see my cursor, we've got the smoke plumes coming from Canada. They go right across the Atlantic to Europe and onto Asia. And at the same time as heading out into the Atlantic, there's also a plume that goes up to the Arctic, and you can also you might also notice that there are some fires occurring in eastern Russia, and you can see again that the smoke plumes are quite large there. Now you might notice that there's quite a lot of activity going on on the west coast of Africa, north and west coast of Africa here, and so we're just going to take a look at that, because in this case it's still aerosols, but it's not actually from fires.

36:09 Speaker 4: So we're going to follow the same procedure. We're going to have a look at the corrected reflect and symmetry, and I'm just.

36:16 Speaker 5: Going to scroll through to third I think it is.

36:22 Speaker 4: Yeah, so what we what we What we saw here was that we were seeing fairly high aerosol in disease in the Sahara. And we can tell whether or not it's smoke or fire by looking to see if there's any fires close by and if we can see any smoke plumes, and in this case there isn't. And also if you turn this off, you can see that we have a huge dust plume coming off the west coast of Mauritanium. And again if I just zoom out, you can start to see.

37:00 Speaker 1: It.

37:00 Speaker 5: Catch up, there we are.

37:01 Speaker 4: You can see the smoke plume coming out into the ocean, and there you can see the OMPs aerosol index. And I probably should have put this back down to the original value before I started, so again it's approximately got okay, So there's an example of dust rather than just than smoke.

37:23 Speaker 5: Okay.

37:25 Speaker 4: So the other thing that I wanted to look at

37:31 Speaker 4: was an example from India. So in northern India, there tends to be recurring seasonal haze and pollution that becomes trapped near the ground by seasonal weather patterns, and this can create unhealthy air quality.

37:49 Speaker 2: So here we are, we've.

37:51 Speaker 4: Jumped to India for November first, and you can see here that we have these seasonal agricultural fires. This is they burn the remaining stubble after the rice harvest. So this stubble burning often creates haze and smoke. And again if you use the timeslider, you can see how this progresses. And this is this has been a source of contention often in the news in Delhi and northern India due to the poor equality. So I just wanted to show you what a pyrocumulinnimbus event looks like in firms. So I've jumped over to the advanced mode here and we are looking at the Vias Noah twenty one imagery and you can see that we've got very thick smoke here we've got the winds going from kind of west to east, and if we put on the aerosol index, you can see that we've got quite high values.

38:59 Speaker 4: And if we put on the pyrocumula numbers event, you can see procumulan nimbus layer. You can see that where you've got these gaps in the standard layer, it's filled in with the OMPs pyrocb layer. So I'm just going to turn those off for a moment and just zoom in, so what we're actually seeing the pyrocumulin umbus event. You can actually see them pretty well here. But what's happening is the higher values in terms of the aerosol index only show when the smoke has been lifted into the air and is being transported.

39:35 Speaker 4: But yeah, just to show you quickly what it looks like, I'm going to just put on the year's twenty one active fires and again just to show you here if you want to kind of just match the daytime fires with the imagery so it's coincident, you can even again change the size of the pixel so you can really get a good view of the smoke. And in this case, what I just wanted to also show you is that in the advance mode, we have the HLS layers and I think we've seen these in previous art set trainings, but here you can put on the I think it's a lands of that data.

40:14 Speaker 4: Yeah, and if you zoom right in again, you can see that thick smoke that's funneling up, the funneling up into the shopsphere and then being lofted across. And I think it's so these pyrocum numbus events, we've seen quite a few of them this year and in previous years. I think twenty twenty three had a record number of PYROCB events in Canada. And these are very much a smoke fire induced thunderstorms that can impact the weather and loft these smoke aerosols far into transported very many kilometers.

40:58 Speaker 4: I just wanted to cap on when to use each product. So the standard OMPs aerosol index should be used for most situations for routine monitoring for smoke and aerosols, and the PYROCB aerosol Index layers should be used when there are extreme events, when you think there might be fire, th fire created thunderstorms or gaps in the aerosol index product. And then just by way of recap. I think FIRMS is particularly useful for monitoring and tracking smoke by starting with the true color imagery to give you a visual overview of smoke potential, smoke and aerosols, and then you can add in the OMPs aerosol index, and then I recommend that you add in the active first better distinguished between smoke and other forms of aerosols, and then switch to the PYROCB aerosol index if values exceed five, and then use the temporal progression to track the fires over a number of days.

42:01 Speaker 4: And you can also use the orbit tracks and subdaily timeline for adding additional time context.

42:12 Speaker 1: Okay, thank you so much Diane and Jenny, and thank you very much for demonstrating those for us today. Just as a summary, today we look at an overview of available burned area data sets and post fire imagery and indices. We had a demonstration of FIRMS burned area mode, an overview of available aerosol indsease, and then a demonstration FIRM smoke and aerosols mode. Looking ahead to part two, we'll be visualizing active fire information on static graph and interactive maps. Analyze active fire information using a fire count instagram overview of static thermal anomaly data available in firms and how to use that static thermal anomaly data information to identify through mo anomalies that are likely not vegetation fires.

43:05 Speaker 1: And just as a reminder, after part two, we'll have your homework available and we'll be DOUE on the third of December. Anybody who attends both live webinars and complete the homework by the third or receive a certificate via email approximately two months after the completion data of this training. Here's the contact information for Jenny Houston, Diane Davies, and myself Rock Blevins, as well as a link to the our Set website and our Set YouTube channel. Thank you very much, and now we'll start the question and answer session.

43:43 Speaker 1: Okay, great, well, let's just jump right into it here. Your questions have been coming in throughout the presentation and we've been diligently getting to these as well as we can before this session, so we can jump right into it. We have Jenny and Diane on here, so we'll start up with question one. Most of the satellite analysis is mainly for focusing on examining the incident that happened already in stead update intervals extend the damage further, Is there any possibility to predict or foresee the incident beforehand?

44:25 Speaker 4: I'll take bachelor Jenny, Okay, So no, there aren't any specific layers in firms global that enable users to predict fires unfortunately, and we have struggled with the idea of putting in some kind of fire danger rating globally so that that's just not available as local conditions vary. However, Firms has recently added vegetation indices from HLS which Jenny showed, and these can be found in the advanced mode and include the normalized difference vegetation index and normalized difference moisture index and these could be used locally to help monitor fuel conditions For firms.

45:04 Speaker 4: US Canada, there are a couple of layers which may be of interest. There's a US Flag warning and a US fire weather watch. So these are watches and warnings issued by the National Weather Service and their criteria varies for each and National Weather Service forecast area. Fireweather watch is issued when there's a combination of dry fuels and feather condition weather conditions that support extreme fire danger, and the red flag warnings are issued when these extreme conditions are anticipated in the next twenty four hours.

45:38 Speaker 1: Thanks Brad, great, thank you very much. Second question, the HLS products only available over US and Canada or with Firm Global. Can we access the data set? Well?

45:53 Speaker 2: Thanks Brok.

45:54 Speaker 3: So the data are actually available in Firms Global. One thing to note that there is a delay in the data set, that there is a lag of anywhere between two to four days. So again, the imagery is available in firms US, Canada as well as Global. Sometimes it can be helpful to zoom out and just be a little patient so you can see the imagery actually.

46:27 Speaker 2: Load on the screen.

46:29 Speaker 3: And just to know, this is different than the Lancet Active Fire data and they are only available for the US and Canada. So again the HLS imagery are available globally.

46:45 Speaker 2: With this with this light lagtime.

46:50 Speaker 1: Question three, given that the firm's platform will not be updated temporarily as indicated by the I notification, what alternative solutions can you offer us?

47:01 Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for the question. So there are no enhancements. Are are updates being made to the website currently due to the lapse in funding, but the Active five detections and image products continue to be ingested automatically into firms Additionally, any antages or data nomenblis that occur have been addressed as as as as they've occurred.

47:35 Speaker 1: Great, thank you. We'll see what we can do to swing back around and address question number four. In the meantime, we'll move on to number five. I'm working with the Generator working on generating monthly time series data sets of burned severity metrics over large Baxel scales using modus. My main challenge is identifying appropriate free fire and post fire time windows for calculating the NBR for each month. To suggest this effective approach, So.

48:10 Speaker 2: I'm actually going to invite my colleagues to address this.

48:16 Speaker 3: But I actually think this question will take a little bit of time to just think about and develop the best.

48:25 Speaker 2: Answer for Diana.

48:26 Speaker 3: I don't know if you have an idea off the top of your head.

48:33 Speaker 5: It's such a great question.

48:35 Speaker 4: I think it would be better off getting a proper answer from some of our science team to help answer this question.

48:44 Speaker 2: And we do.

48:46 Speaker 3: As you know, we do answer all of the questions as soon as we as soon as the webinar finishes and we have additional information available.

48:58 Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great. We figure we might as well give a little bit more of a thorough answer to this, So please give a little bit of time to make sure that we can answer this answer this as accurately as we can. Question number six, does the aersow invex correlate with the concentration of smoke stums?

49:22 Speaker 4: That is my understanding that it's to do with density and height of smoke plumes. But again, I feel like this is a very technical question and I will confirm once we circle back with the final answers, unless anybody else on my team would like to chime in.

49:51 Speaker 2: I am in agreement, Diane.

49:52 Speaker 3: I think addressing this when we have additional information that will be ideal.

50:00 Speaker 1: Great. Once again, in the sake of accuracy, please give us some moments on that one. Question number seven, is there some way to use amps in a geostationary satellite?

50:09 Speaker 3: So OPS is on board SMPP NOAH twenty No twenty one. These are all polar orbiting satellites versus the geostationary satellites such as GO as the East and West.

50:26 Speaker 1: Eight. I mean use this data to predict when first nation communities to look at evacuation. So it just looks like emergency response, and.

50:40 Speaker 4: Sure we would question against that the data are provided as it is, and we take no kind of responsibility for it being used in evacuation circumstances. We would rather advise that you use local knowledge on the ground. Obviously, sometimes people find the data is helpful, but please remember that you know the data is near real time, so approximately three hours after satellite overpass, and these are polar orbiting satellites, so they're not constantly updated.

51:12 Speaker 5: Throughout the day.

51:13 Speaker 4: We have the geostationary satellites which do have you know, they are updated throughout the day and night. However, the spatial resolution of those pixels is not really good enough for that kind of decision making.

51:29 Speaker 1: I would say, great, so the deal stationary data have a higher temporal but maybe the straight off being spatial.

51:41 Speaker 5: Yes, thanks for that clarification.

51:43 Speaker 1: Yeah, Question nine, are temperatures of the fire? Of the temperatures of the fire is available.

51:51 Speaker 3: I was trying to find your new button there. So the radiative power FRP, which is the energy of the fire, is available in attribute information and the actifier detections. And this can be identified by by actually clicking on the active fire detection, which will bring up the attribute information for each of the detections.

52:19 Speaker 1: Thanks on the work well provided. Are there are structured guidelines on how to properly reference the data acquired?

52:30 Speaker 5: We do have that information.

52:31 Speaker 4: We have a something you can use on your using our data and we will.

52:37 Speaker 5: Pop that in the chat as soon as I can find it.

52:39 Speaker 4: It's and the data use and data use guidance and disclaimers.

52:44 Speaker 5: So let me put that in the chat for you.

52:48 Speaker 1: Great, thank you very much, and I'll also include that link in the document for future reference to. Then question eleven, are these layers only applicable in Google Earth Engine or they can? Can they also be used in rgis pro as that is the main software used at my institution.

53:16 Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm rapidly putting the answer in here so that the burned Area products are available in HGF geotif and shapefel format and certainly the geotif and shapefel can be used in r GI s pro, and there is information on the on the firm's website if you look under download archived Data, so those can be downloaded and used in r gis pro. Additionally, the active fier detections are available in multiple formats including CSV and and shapes and so they can also be used in our jais.

54:02 Speaker 1: Okay, So I don't see any other questions adding to the question answer box. If you're not able to find that, please look for the three little dots on the left lower corner of either your application or your web browser, and you can see a Q and A section We can answer your question or ask the questions, and we'll move those over to this document. What we'll end up doing is cleaning this up for accuracy and then posting this ideally within a week, So hopefully before part two next week, we can have this available on the website for your reference.

54:47 Speaker 1: Which sensor characteristics are essential for accurate detection and retrieval atmospheric aerosols sate observations. So I guess it's just to come and some of the characteristics of the sensory.

55:10 Speaker 4: Oh, everybody's really challenging us today. I don't I couldn't give you a good answer to that either. I'm really sorry. I think we'll have to circle.

55:21 Speaker 5: Back to you.

55:25 Speaker 1: Okay, So we'll bring this question to the science team and so look for this answer once we post to our train web page.

55:35 Speaker 4: Yeah, I should just say that, you know, we work very closely with our science teams that they provide us with all this type of information and we aim to make it easily accessible through firms. So apologies for not being able to answer those questions.

55:51 Speaker 1: Well, to see a couple more pop in here. This one seems to be a little bit more of a use case or hypothetical or maybe there's some case studies doing this. But how can satellite managoring help in estate management? So I'm guessing this of mitigation and preparedness, I.

56:10 Speaker 5: Can take a stab at that, I guess.

56:13 Speaker 4: You know, you can look at things like which areas have burnt over time that might be useful for understanding fire regimes in your particular state or area of interest. You can also look to see which areas have burnt and so you might get a better understanding of which areas are more likely to burn in subsequent years of fire seasons. Again, you know, I mentioned earlier on that we have vegetation indices from the HLS data.

56:43 Speaker 5: Again that might.

56:44 Speaker 4: Help you understand what your vegetation conditions are like and give you a sense of whether or not it's more likely to burn. And the same thing for the active fire data. You know, again, you can look at fire patterns over time. We also have an email alert service which is freely available, so if you wanted to put your coordinates in, we could send you an alert when there's a fire in or close to your particular area of interest.

57:18 Speaker 1: Question number fourteen, you mentioned a two to six percent difference and fire detection between motives and fears, one time bias higher than the other, and it looks like we have yeah.

57:33 Speaker 2: Thanks to that question. Sorry brough up to interrupt.

57:38 Speaker 3: In fact, all of the information on the inter comparison between the modus and viewers burned area products is available in the jiglio at our paper, and I have pasted the link for that paper.

57:54 Speaker 2: In the question.

57:58 Speaker 1: We'll just tackle these last two here. Real quick confirms contect some greenhouse gases.

58:04 Speaker 2: So the active Frier detections and the Burndery products that.

58:08 Speaker 3: They don't directly detect any any greenhouse gases, but they can be used in the in the calculation of different greenhouse gases. And Diane, I don't know if you want to add any additional information.

58:25 Speaker 1: To that question sixteen. What are the strengths and limitation of Arizon products for detecting low altitude smoke versus strata spirits here.

58:39 Speaker 3: Yeah, another excellent question, and we can certainly consult the science team members to get some more information on this.

58:50 Speaker 4: And I would just just from having spoken to the science team recently.

58:57 Speaker 5: In preparation for this again say that generally it would be you know, you can use.

59:04 Speaker 4: Sort of the lower A result index values indicate that you've got low altitude smoke, and you can look at the corrected reflectance imagery to try and verify this, and we will circle back on.

59:21 Speaker 5: This answer to make sure we have it correct.

59:23 Speaker 4: And when you have much higher AI value, so you would be looking at the pyro CB layer here, so values above five, that's when you're more likely to have these dense smoke, dense smoke that's gone higher into stratospheric.

59:41 Speaker 5: Into stratospheric layer. And I'd say that you know, the higher the.

59:45 Speaker 4: Value, the more likely the smoke has gone higher up.

59:52 Speaker 1: We are at time here today, I want to respect everybody's day. Thank you very much for joining us for part one of this series. Hopefully you had a chance to pick this training for the intro one back in April. If not, all the recordings, videos, homeworks are available so you can self pace through it, but we wanted to offer this one to highlight some of the additional features that have been corporated in the firms. So thank you very much Jenny and Diane for showing us those and please join us for part two next week, And thank you very much for joining us, and we'll see you next week