Global Real-time Fire Emission Estimates Based on Space-borne Fire Radiative Power Observations

We present the first real-time system for the estimation of global biomass burning emissions from several different satellite-based fire radiative power (FRP) observations. The FRP products from the MODIS and SEVIRI instruments oil Aqua, Terra, and Meteosat-9 are combined by averaging all pixels with fire detection or just the potential of fire detection oil it global grid with similar to 125 km resolution. The total observed area per grid cell is used as a proxy for the accuracy of the estimation. Thus the different observations can be merged consistently and the advantage the high temporal sampling frequency of the geostationary observation is maintained while almost global coverage is achieved with the polar orbiting platforms. The system is being tested and validation is ongoing. As a first trial application, daily pyrogenic carbon monoxide emissions are used in the European GEMS project to produce 3-day forecasts of the carbon monoxide plumes emitted by biomass burning. Some potential improvements of the method are discussed.