MODIS based forest fire hotspot analysis and its relationship with climatic variables

• Published in: Spatial information research (Online) Vol. 28; no. 1; pp. 87 - 99
• Main Authors: Kumari, Binita, Pandey, Arvind Chandra
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Singapore Springer Singapore 01.02.2020; 대한공간정보학회
• Subjects: Database Management; Earth and Environmental Science; Geographical Information Systems/Cartography; Geography; Remote Sensing/Photogrammetry; 공학일반; Fire frequency; Forest fire; Climatic parameters; LST; Hotspot; MODIS
• ISSN: 2366-3286; 2366-3294
• DOI: 10.1007/s41324-019-00275-z

Global warming caused an increase of forest fire events worldwide causing widespread forest degradation. Geospatial techniques aid in analysing climatic parameters to examine their relationship with forest fire. The research analyses time series forest fire events during 2001–2017 to deduce forest fire hotspots in PTR. MODIS forest fire spots was converted into points and hotspot analysis tool was used to map hotspot. The forest fire incidences were analysed with reference to climatic parameters viz. precipitation, solar radiation (SR), mean temperature and relative humidity (RH). The average RH was highest in May (0.69) and lowest in March (0.18), whereas high temperature with low RH was observed till the end of April. The SR was highest in April (27.24 MJ/m 2 ) whereas lowest in May (15.68 MJ/m 2 ). Satellite based land surface temperature (LST) was compared with fire spot and found that area having high temperature lies under high forest fire zone. The highest LST observed was 49.52 °C whereas the lowest was 29.40 °C. The study revealed that most forest fires occurred during March–April and total forest fire events was 1212. For accuracy assessment an analysis between fire pixels and post fire data from Landsat was shown, which showed that same areas were under forest fires during 2001–2017.