Sentinel-3 SLSTR active fire (AF) detection and FRP daytime product - Algorithm description and global intercomparison to MODIS, VIIRS and landsat AF data

Abstract

The Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) senses the Earth from onboard two concurrently operating European Copernicus Sentinel-3 (S3) satellites. As the Terra platform carrying the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) is reaching its end of life, the S3 Active Fire Detection and FRP products generated from data captured by S3 SLSTR are expected to soon become the main global active fire (AF) product for the mid-morning and evening low Earth orbit timeslots. The S3 night-time AF product issued by the European Space Agency (ESA) has been operational since March 2020, and here we report on the significant adjustments made to enable the generation of a complimentary daytime product. Similar to MODIS, SLSTR possesses two middle infrared channels, both a ‘standard’ (normal gain; S7) channel and a ‘fire’ (low-gain; F1) channel - but in contrast to MODIS by day even the ambient background land surface is often saturated in the SLSTR standard gain MIR (S7) channel. This saturation necessitates far greater use of the F1 channel data by day for active fire detection than by night, even though F1 has characteristics which make its data more challenging to combine with that from the other SLSTR thermal infrared channels. Here we report on the approaches used to combine S7 and F1 data for optimized daytime AF detection, and also detail the other algorithm adjustments found necessary to include in the daytime AF product algorithm. We compare the resulting daytime SLSTR AF product data to that generated from near-simultaneous views provided by MODIS onboard Terra. When both sensors detect the same active fire cluster at similar time, there is minimal bias shown between the two FRP retrievals (the ordinary least squares linear best fit between matched SLSTR and MODIS per-fire FRP matchups has a slope of 0.97). At the regional scale, the S3 product detects 70% of the AF pixels that the matching MODIS product reports, but also provides a further (16%) set of unique AF pixel detections. Regional FRP totals derived from SLSTR appear slightly lower than those from MODIS, and the OLS linear best fit between these regional FRP matchup datasets has a slope of 0.91. This is largely due to SLSTR performing less well in detecting the lowest FRP fires by day, whereas by night the S3 product performs a little better than MODIS due to the increased night-time use of S7 in the earlier AF pixel detection stages. Global fire mapping at a 0.25° grid cell resolution shows very similar daytime fire patterns and FRP totals from S3 and Terra MODIS, with SLSTR detecting around twice the number of AF pixels due to the algorithm being more effective at identifying low FRP pixels at the edges of fire clusters. Regional time series case studies also show very similar temporal patterns between S3 and Terra MODIS. Longer-term intercomparisons such as these will provide the knowledge necessary to use MODIS and SLSTR AF products together to analyse long-term AF trends. Comparing near simultaneous observations of fires by SLSTR and from the 30 m spatial resolution Landsat Operational Land Image (OLI) data, we find that once there are around 150 OLI active fire pixels detected within the area of an SLSTR pixel, the chances of that SLSTR pixel being classed as an active fire by the daytime algorithm rises to almost 100%. The daytime SLSTR AF Detection and FRP product based on the algorithm described herein has been fully operational since March 2022 and is available from the Sentinel-3 Science Hub (https://scihub.copernicus.eu/).