United States Fire Observations and MODIS NDVI
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- Visualizations by:
- Lori Perkins
- View full credits
From space, we can understand fires in ways that are impossible from the ground. NASA has released a series of new visualizations that show fires detected by key fire-monitoring instruments on NASA satellites over the last decade. The visualizations show fire observations made by MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on board the Terra and Aqua satellites. The visualization also includes vegetation and snow cover data to show how fires respond to seasonal changes. "It's incredibly satisfying to see such a long record of fires visualized," said Chris Justice, a scientist from the University of Maryland who leads NASA's effort to use MODIS data to study the world's fires. "It's not only exciting visually, but what you see here is a very good representation of the data scientists use to understand the global distribution of fires and to determine where and how fires are responding to climate change and population growth." North America is a region where fires are comparatively rare. North American fires make up just 2 percent of the world's burned area each year. The fires that receive the most attention in the United States, the uncontrolled forest fires in the West, are less visible than the wave of agricultural fires prominent in the Southeast and along the Mississippi River Valley, but some of the large wildfires that struck Texas earlier this spring are visible.
More information on the Fire Information for Resource Management (FIRMS) is available at http://maps.geog.umd.edu/firms/.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
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Animators
- Lori Perkins (NASA/GSFC) [Lead]
- Greg Shirah (NASA/GSFC)
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Writer
- Adam P. Voiland (SSAI)
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Scientists
- Chris Justice (University of Maryland)
- Louis Giglio (University of Maryland)
- Luigi Boschetti (University Of Maryland College Park)
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Producer
- Kayvon Sharghi (USRA)
Missions
This visualization is related to the following missions:Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
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Terra and Aqua NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI))
ID: 633 -
Terra and Aqua Fire Location
ID: 496Credit: Fire location data courtesy of MODIS Rapid Response Project (NASA/GSFC and University of Maryland - http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov)
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Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.
Related Pages
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ID: 11076 Produced Video
America On Fire
Read moreFor more than a decade, NASA satellites have monitored fires around the world. The data that is collected provides scientists with information about the location of fires, how much land is burned and how fires are responding to changes in climate. Dry conditions, for example, fueled a number of wildfires in the United States in recent years. From 2009 to 2011, more than 200,000 fires burned 18 million acres, or roughly all of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware and Rhode Island. Exacerbated by ongoing drought conditions in the South, the state of Texas experienced an extreme wildfire season in 2011 that consumed more than 2.7 million acres. The visualization shows fires detected in the United States from July 2002 through July 2011 by the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites. Look for fires that reliably burn each year in western states and across the Southeast. ||
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