MODIS-detected fire regime in Great Britain: potential and challenges of validating against national fire incident data

Comparison against 19 days of national Incident Recording System (IRS) fire statistics for England in spring 2011 showed that MODIS Rapid Response hotspot data missed 92% of significant vegetation fires attended by Fire Services due to a combination of cloud, smoke, small fire size and short fire duration. Despite this, MODIS provides a near-real time, if only very partial, national picture of the geography of large fires in Great Britain, for operational fire managers, which is currently not available from IRS due to delays in collation and spatially aggregated reporting. Fire managers require faster, spatially-specific delivery of IRS data on wildfires (and an agreed definition of ?wildfire? using IRS data fields).IRS is limited as a validation source for remote sensing because fire location is recorded as a single point with estimated burned area. Standardising this point and/or recording fire perimeter would assist validation of remote sensing fire products and facilitate spatial analysis of GB?s fire regime.