visualization information

GOES-8 time series of smoke blowing down across the northeast US from forest fires in Quebec during 5-8 July, 2002.

This time series animation shows forest fires burning in Quebec, Canada from 5-8 July, 2002. Smoke from the fires drifts down across the northeast US. The animation displays the fires as red dots. The background image during the day is a blue/green image showing land and water, while at night it is the DMSP city lights dataset. The clouds in the animation are visible channel data during the day and 11 micron data (channel 4) during the night.

The fires are detected using the GOES-8 4 micron channel and 11 micron channels. Pixels are flagged as fires if their 4 micron temperatures or their 4 micron - 11 micron temperature differences are greater than specified limits. The plot below shows the relationship between the 4 micron temperature and the 4 micron - 11 micron temperature difference for a GOES-8 daytime image from this time series. I selected fire pixels by hand for this scene and colored them red on the plot. The black line shows the limit the program uses to automatically detect fires, data above and to the right of the line are counted as fires.

GOES-8 infrared temperature relationship for fires