Active Fires As Observed by VIIRS, January-September 2021

  • Released Friday, October 1, 2021
  • Updated Thursday, November 4, 2021 at 1:23PM
  • ID: 4945

This visualization shows active fires as observed by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, or VIIRS, between January 1 and September 24 2021. The VIIRS instrument flies on the Joint Polar Satellite System’s Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20 polar-orbiting satellites. Instruments on polar orbiting satellites typically observe a wildfire at a given location a few times a day as they orbit the Earth from pole to pole. VIIRS detects hot spots at a resolution of 375 meters per pixel, which means it can detect smaller, lower temperature fires than other fire-observing satellites. Its observations are about three times more detailed than those from the MODIS instrument, for example. VIIRS also provides nighttime fire detection capabilities through its Day-Night Band, which can measure low-intensity visible light emitted by small and fledgling fires. This visualization uses data from the Suomi-NPP VIIRS instrument, and will be updated periodically until the end of 2021.


Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio


Datasets used in this visualization

Terra and Aqua BMNG (A.K.A. Blue Marble: Next Generation) (Collected with the MODIS sensor)

Credit: The Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC).

Dataset can be found at: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/

See more visualizations using this data set
Suomi NPP Fire Pixels (Collected with the VIIRS sensor)
AnalysisNASA/GSFC

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.



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