VJ114A1: Daily Global Fire and Thermal Anomaly Detection

NOAA-20 VIIRS Thermal Anomalies and Fire (VJ114A1) Version 2 is a daily, global satellite data product. It provides a 1-kilometer gridded composite of active fire pixels and other thermal anomalies detected by the VIIRS instrument. The dataset includes four Science Dataset layers for fire confidence, maximum fire radiative power, quality assessment, and fire position within the sensor scan.

Use Cases

• Monitoring wildfire spread and intensity based on daily fire radiative power (FRP) measurements.
• Assessing fire detection confidence for validation studies using the provided quality assessment (QA) layer.
• Analyzing global fire occurrence patterns over time using the daily, gridded composite format.
• Improving geolocation accuracy in downstream environmental models based on the Version 2 algorithm updates.

Strengths

• Provides daily global coverage at a 1-kilometer spatial resolution.
• Version 2 includes specific improvements to calibration, geolocation accuracy, and cloud/land masking.
• Cross-platform presence on NASA Earthdata and Data.gov signals its importance and reliability for the research community.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are not provided by any source.
• The license is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified' without explicit terms.
• Documentation of known issues requires external referral to a NASA website.

Provenance

Source

NOAA-20 satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument, processed by LPCLOUD.

Collection Method

Satellite remote sensing, with daily gridded composite processing from 750-meter bands.

Time Range

Daily (24-hour) periods; specific start date not provided.

Freshness

Last updated on 2026-04-09 according to nasa_earthdata and datagov.

Geography

Global.