Fire Module:
Early Warning and Response to Peatland Fires in Central Kalimantan

Find Data Sources

In this section, you will learn about the sources for data on fire activity, rainfall, sea surface temperature and land surface temperature.

Data on fire activity on the ground are available for a few years and for select regions only. Therefore, satellite data are used to determine the number of active fires, which are called " hotspots ." Data on hotspots were collected and consolidated from 2 satellites:

There are a number of satellite and airborne remote sensing systems which can be used to monitor fire from space. The sensors used for monitoring fires in Indonesia have mainly been the sensors NOAA-AVHRR and TERRA-MODIS. These two sensors have been used to retrieve the number of hotspots in this study. Other sensors, such as (A)ATSR, have also been used in other studies.

These sensors measure the energy emitted by fires and therefore the product derived from satellite measurement is often referred to as hotspot rather than fire. There are many factors that can affect the detection of hotspots, such as cloud and smoke, hot soil and sun glint. Many different algorithms have been developed to account for those factors, which often lead to different fire hotspot estimates.

  • National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA)-Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR)
  • TERRA-Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)

The MODIS hotspots were received from CARE Indonesia and the AVHRR hotspots were collected by the South Sumatra Forest Fire Management Project (SSFFMP), the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and received from Bogor Agriculture University. Using these observations, hotspot numbers were computed for each month between January 1998 and December 2006.