The VIIRS Active Fire (AF) product is produced using data running in operational mode within NOAA Office of Satellite and Product Operations (OSPO). In collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Geography, the Active Fires team, led by Dr. Ivan Csiszar , developed the fire detection algorithm (https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/jpss/fires.php and http://viirsfire.geog.umd.edu/pages/products.php). This is an adaptation of the MODIS Collection 6 algorithm and uses Level 1 M-band data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) satellite to generate the VIIRS AF data. The Suomi NPP VIIRS instrument is a collaborative partnership between NASA and NOAA.

OSPO receives this data in large (~ 12mb) netcdf files. We extract the fire positions, confidence value, fire mask, brightness temperature, fire radiative power, and other metadata and place them in comma-delimited tables. These tables are input to the Hazardous Mapping System operated at the Satellite Analysis Branch (SAB), and used in the daily fire and smoke analysis.

Users should note:

• This data is generated by an automated algorithm and is placed on the web page in near-realtime. It has not been quality controlled. Validation efforts are only beginning. For a quality controlled product, users are referred to the Hazard Mapping System (HMS) product created by SSD satellite analysts.
• Fire pixels represent the approximate location of a fire and do not represent the actual fire size. The VIIRS instantaneous field of view at nadir is 0.75 km, but the fire phenomena may be much smaller than that.
• If no fires are detected for a given pass, a file is not placed on the server.
• Each pass represents 86 seconds of the satellite orbit.

Download most current fire files (available in ASCII, GIS and graphic formats).

The recent fires identified by the VIIRS fire product are shown below (README):