NGFS detection of a barrier Island fire in Texas: GOES and VIIRS
CSPP Geosphere imagery on 5 March, above, (direct link to imagery), shows the development of a smoke plume from a fire at the north end of San Jose Island. When did the Next Generation Fire System first identify the fire that caused the smoke plume? The NGFS Alerts Dashboard, below, shows a detection over Aransas County.
What did those CONUS (every five minute) detections show?The animation below shows NGFS Microphysics, Fire Temperature RGB and Band 7 (Shortwave infrared, 3.9 µm) imagery from GOES-16. The NGFS detection occurred at 1646 UTC. The fire develops quickly and the Fire Temperature RGB and Band 7 imagery show a very obvious fire signal by 1701 UTC.
NGFS detections also occur with VIIRS imagery that has much greater spatial resolution, as fine as 375m for some infrared (and visible) channels. The NOAA-21 overpass shows a smoke plume in the GeoColor imagery below, and three separate fire detections in these Real Earth screenshots (from here).
A zoomed-in view of the NGFS detections and the NGFS Microphysics is shown below. Of particular note is that VIIRS data resolves three separate fires.
What did GOES show at the same time? That’s shown below in a toggle between GeoColor and the NGFS Microphysics RGB. The advantages of the higher-resolution VIIRS imagery shown above is obvious. VIIRS coverage is somewhat limited over CONUS; it is much more plentiful over Alaska where GOES pixel sizes have become large because of the distance to Alaska from the sub-satellite point of GOES-18.
This detection on 5 March was over a relatively uninhabited region, where satellite detection will likely give the earliest alert for responders. On 4 March, when much of south Texas was within a critical fire weather outlook from SPC, a fire developed within the pixels that included at the NWS Corpus Christi office! The NGFS detections for that (brief) grassland fire are shown below.
This example on 4 March demonstrates why it’s important for a weather office to have windows!