A NEW METHOD OF ACTIVE FIRE DETECTION BASED ON SUBPIXEL RETRIEVAL OF FIRE TEMPERATURE USING ATMOSPHERICALLY CORRECTED MODIS THERMAL INFRARED DATA

摘要

In the humid tropics, humidity is high implying high water vapour content in the atmosphere. This causes strong attenuation to the radiation measured in the thermal infrared as the main absorption in this region is the water vapour. The thermal infrared region contains bands that were traditionally used for fire detection. In addition, fires are detected by thresholding the brightness temperature at 4μm. In this study, we propose to correct the MODIS thermal data for atmospheric effects. Subpixel retrieval is then carried out to obtain the sub resolution fire temperature which is used to determine whether the pixel can be classified as a fire hotspot. The results obtained shows that using subpixel retrieval technique to detect fires is feasible under cloud free conditions.