Forest and Field Fire Search System Using MODIS Data

Abstract

Tokyo University of Information Sciences receives MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) data from NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites, and provides the processed data to universities and research institutes as part of the academic frontier project. This paper considers the utilization of MODIS data for a system to search for fire regions in forests and fields. For the search system to be effective, the system must be able to extract the location, range and distribution of fires in forests and fields from a large scale image database quickly with high accuracy. In order to achieve high search response time and to improve the accuracy of the analysis, we propose a forest and field fire search system which implements a) a parallel distributed system configuration using multiple PC clusters, and b) MOD02, MOD03 and MOD09 process levels of MODIS data for input data which provide higher resolution and more accurate readings than the standard MOD14 process level data.