Context

Current news about Australia bushfire has been spreading fast, however, the same can't be said about the datasets. This NASA FIRMS MODIS and VIIRS Fire/Hotspot provide an initial dataset for fires in Australia. My main motivation to provide this dataset was the following article:

• BBC News - Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral

See the Ideas Section at the bottom for more inspiration.

Content

The current dataset provides 4 tables from 2 NASA Satellite Instruments:

• MODIS C6 Tables

  • fire_archive_M6_96619.csv
  • fire_nrt_M6_96619.csv

• VIIRS 375m Tables

  • fire_archive_V1_96617.csv
  • fire_nrt_V1_96617.csv

The provided URLs contain more details on the two instrument differences. Each instrument contains two types of tables: Near Real Time (_nrt_) and older standard/science quality data (_archive). According to the README provided with the dataset, NRT data are replaced with standard quality data when they are available (usually with a 2-3 month lag). This time-lag can be observed on the tables by verifying the acq_date column (See available Kaggle Notebook). For more details between NRT and Archive see this link.

More information on the instruments used for this dataset can be found here and here. All columns have been annotated with the description following Kaggle format. For data provenance, see the Metadata section.

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the use of data and imagery from LANCE FIRMS operated by NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) with funding provided by NASA Headquarters.

NRT VIIRS 375 m Active Fire product VNP14IMGT. Available on-line [https://earthdata.nasa.gov/firms]. doi: 10.5067/FIRMS/VIIRS/VNP14IMGT.NRT.001.

MODIS Collection 6 NRT Hotspot / Active Fire Detections MCD14DL. Available on-line [https://earthdata.nasa.gov/firms]. doi: 10.5067/FIRMS/MODIS/MCD14DL.NRT.006

Inspiration

Current news articles are a wonderful inspiration for ways to analyze this data and or combine to other datasets. Some ideas:

• Australia fires: A visual guide to the bushfire crisis
• Australia bushfires factcheck: are this year's fires unprecedented?

There is also other information that can be combined with this dataset, such as local air quality, and local alerts to increase accuracy.

Found an error? Let me know!

Feel free to post on Discussion anything strange you may find, and I will be happy to follow-up.