Duration time detection of Forest Fire by Advanced HIMAWARI-8 Imager (AHI) for Indonesian peat fires in 2015.

Abstract

We investigated the feasibility of using the Himawari-8, a Japanese meteorological geostationary satellite with high temporal resolution (receiving data at 10-minute intervals), to measure the time from fire outbreak to extinction. We selected the study area in Central Kalimantan, in Indonesia, containing peatland. We first investigated which band of Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) is more sensitive for detecting fire areas and which band is suitable for tracking time-series change of fire area. Therefore, we first used the Landsat 8 data of 2015/10/22 for visual interpretation of the fire area and then selected pixels corresponding to the fire area from the AHI data acquired at about the same time as the Landsat 8 data. We found that band 7 of the AHI is the most suitable for detecting fire area even if the ratio of fire area in one pixel is low, and we assumed that not only high values of band 7 but also the short-term fluctuations are characteristics of fires. To establish this assumption, we separated the value of band 7 into 2 components, mean value and short-term fluctuations, μtm, and Dtm, respectively. Then, we applied these two indices to the data for September 2015 and confirmed how fire occurrence and extinguishment were captured by these two indices.