Exploring the Utility of Next-Generation Geostationary Observations for Wildfire Impact and Burn Severity Assessment

Polar-orbiting sensors are often preferred for wildfire monitoring due to their finer spatial resolution. However, next-generation geostationary wildfire observations can offer much more frequent information about wildfire activity. In this study, we use geostationary wildfire observations from Himawari-8 across the Australian continent (1 year) to derive additional information that can assist with wildfire characterization. We use the active fire information to derive categorize fires into groups and examine their spatial distribution. For each fire type, we explore whether the inclusion of active fire data can offer information that can complement commonly used burn severity indices. We argue that the two streams of data offer significantly diverse information that together, could further our understanding of wildfire impact. Future burn severity indices should incorporate fire intensity estimations in their derivation, as current techniques are often limited by pre-fire conditions, a dependency on field measurements, and are not straightforward to generalize.