scholarly journals Improved fire severity mapping in the North American boreal forest using a hybrid composite method

Author(s):  
Lisa M. Holsinger ◽  
Sean A. Parks ◽  
Lisa B. Saperstein ◽  
Rachel A. Loehman ◽  
Ellen Whitman ◽  
...  
2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (14) ◽  
pp. 6873-6888 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Peterson ◽  
J. Wang ◽  
C. Ichoku ◽  
L. A. Remer

Abstract. The effects of lightning and other meteorological factors on wildfire activity in the North American boreal forest are statistically analyzed during the fire seasons of 2000–2006 through an integration of the following data sets: the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) level 2 fire products, the 3-hourly 32-km gridded meteorological data from North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR), and the lightning data collected by the Canadian Lightning Detection Network (CLDN) and the Alaska Lightning Detection Network (ALDN). Positive anomalies of the 500 hPa geopotential height field, convective available potential energy (CAPE), number of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, and the number of consecutive dry days are found to be statistically important to the seasonal variation of MODIS fire counts in a large portion of Canada and the entirety of Alaska. Analysis of fire occurrence patterns in the eastern and western boreal forest regions shows that dry (in the absence of precipitation) lightning strikes account for only 20% of the total lightning strikes, but are associated with (and likely cause) 40% of the MODIS observed fire counts in these regions. The chance for ignition increases when a threshold of at least 10 dry strikes per NARR grid box and at least 10 consecutive dry days is reached. Due to the orientation of the large-scale pattern, complex differences in fire and lightning occurrence and variability were also found between the eastern and western sub-regions. Locations with a high percentage of dry strikes commonly experience an increased number of fire counts, but the mean number of fire counts per dry strike is more than 50% higher in western boreal forest sub-region, suggesting a geographic and possible topographic influence. While wet lightning events are found to occur with a large range of CAPE values, a high probability for dry lightning occurs only when 500 hPa geopotential heights are above ~5700 m and CAPE values are near the maximum observed level, underscoring the importance of low-level instability to boreal fire weather forecasts.


1965 ◽  
Vol 97 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. Hopping

AbstractGroup VIII of North American Ips contains I. interruptus (Mannerheim), I. engelmanni Swaine, I. amiskwiensis G. Hopping, I. sulcifrons Wood, I. pilifrons Swaine, I. yohoensis Swaine, I. tridens (Mannerheim) and I. semirostris G. Hopping. Females of some species have dense brushes of long setae or pads of short pile covering the frontal protuberance. Species are described and a key is given. All of them breed in spruce, six in the boreal forest and two farther south in the Rocky Mountains.


Fire ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Johnston ◽  
Lynn Johnston ◽  
Martin Wooster ◽  
Alison Brookes ◽  
Colin McFayden ◽  
...  

We develop a simulation model for prediction of forest canopy interception of upwelling fire radiated energy from sub-canopy smouldering vegetation fires. We apply this model spatially across the North American boreal forest in order to map minimum detectable sub-canopy smouldering fire size for three satellite fire detection systems (sensor and algorithm), broadly representative of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). We evaluate our results according to fire management requirements for “early detection” of wildland fires. In comparison to the historic fire archive (Canadian National Fire Database, 1980–2017), satellite data with a 1000 m pixel size used with an algorithm having a minimum MWIR channel BT elevation threshold of 5 and 3 K above background (e.g., MODIS or SLSTR) proves incapable of providing a sub-0.2 ha smouldering fire detection 70% and 45% of the time respectively, even assuming that the sensor overpassed the relevant location within the correct time window. By contrast, reducing the pixel area by an order of magnitude (e.g., 375 m pixels of VIIRS) and using a 3.5 K active fire detection threshold offers the potential for successfully detecting all fires when they are still below 0.2 ha. Our results represent a ‘theoretical best performance’ of remote sensing systems to detect sub-canopy smoldering fires early in their lifetime.


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