NASA’s Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) enables users to find and analyze a range of earth system science data and information relevant to the complex and evolving field of wildfire management, impacts, and mitigation. FIRMS facilitates the use of earth system science data to inform science-based decision making through a standardized, readily interpretable interface that supports operational users, researchers, and non-scientific stakeholders. This community-driven interface enables user-friendly exploration of data that are increasingly findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible (FAIR), and the interface is regularly refined to support the diversity, equity, and inclusion of potential end-users. FIRMS offers fire-based maps through Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS), and makes available multiple APIs to support area, country, fire footprint features for stakeholders needing to ingest data into software such as QGIS, ArcGIS, etc. FIRMS developers are also creating a Fire Data Academy to build capacity around the use of Jupyter notebooks, Google Colab, and Python to perform data ingest, manipulation, and visualization. As the impacts of wildfires expand, affecting increasing swaths of population and biodiversity through immediate infrastructure and habitat destruction, and causing longer-term air quality impacts, a transdisciplinary approach to research and response is required. FIRMS supports a transdisciplinary approach through the range of data and information available, ensuring that all users, including those in historically underrepresented communities, can access wildfire data.

NASA has released an updated near real-time global flood map product, based on twice-daily MODIS observations. The short name for the MODIS Near Real-Time (NRT) Global Flood Product is MCDWD. This updated product replaces a PI-maintained system that had delivered flood maps since 2012. The updated product is generated by a more robust processing facility, which also provides additional distribution mechanisms, including web-based global browser. The core water detection algorithm remains the same, but several improvements have been incorporated to reduce false-positives and enhance the compositing process. Additional advancements are on the horizon, including incorporation of VIIRS imagery (to replace the near end-of-life MODIS sensors), and further out, possibly Sentinel-3 OLCI.

NASA's Land, Atmosphere Near Real-Time Capability for Earth Observing Systems (LANCE) supports a host of near real-time (NRT) monitoring applications from air quality to wildfires to flooding to droughts to severe storms. LANCE distributes 40-75 TB of data per week from 13 instruments to a wide range of users in over 200 countries. Most of the data and imagery served through LANCE are available within three hours of satellite overpass. Leveraging the existing NASA infrastructure and science teams has made LANCE unique in its ability to provide data from instruments onboard Earth observing satellites rapidly, accurately, and consistently. LANCE continually ensures these data are findable, readily accessible, and freely available. The evolution of LANCE is ongoing, as it strives to enable researchers and applications users to quickly incorporate the latest satellite data into their work, leading to more timely and accurate understanding of the Earth's land and atmosphere.

Landscape fire is a widespread, somewhat unpredictable phenomena that plays an important part in Earth's biogeochemical cycling. In many biomes worldwide fire also provides multiple ecological benefits, but in certain circumstances can also pose a risk to life and infrastructure, lead to net increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, and to degradation in air quality and consequently human health. Accurate, timely and frequently updated information on landscape fire activity is essential to improve our understanding of the drivers and impacts of this form of biomass burning, as well as to aid fire management. This information can only be provided using satellite Earth Observation (EO) approaches, and remote sensing of active fire is one of the key techniques used. This form of EO is based on detecting the signature of the (mostly infrared) electromagnetic radiation emitted as biomass burns. Since the early 1980's, active fire (AF) remote sensing conducted using low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites has been deployed in certain regions of the world to map the location and timing of landscape fire occurrence, and from the early 2000's global-scale information updated multiple times per day has been easily available to all. Geostationary (GEO) satellites provide even higher frequency AF information, more than 100 times per day in some cases, and both LEO- and GEO-derived AF products now often include estimates of a fires characteristics, such as its fire radiative power (FRP) output, in addition to the fires detection. AF data provide information relevant to fire activity ongoing when the EO data were collected, and this can be delivered with very low latency times to support applications such as air quality forecasting. Here we summarize the history of achievements in the field of active fire remote sensing, review the physical basis of the approaches used, the nature of the AF detection and characterization techniques deployed, and highlight some of the key current capabilities and applications. Finally, we list some important developments we believe deserve focus in future years.

In many regions of the world, fire is an integral part of land-use practices. The accurate spatio-temporal characterization of the fire regime can, therefore, inform land-use policy at many scales. Satellite-based fire detections can be manipulated with GIS methodologies to investigate the spatio-temporal patterns of fire across a landscape. However, caveats and accuracy limitations of data and analysis methodologies must be understood in order to avoid misrepresentation of the fire regime and its impacts. This research uses moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) active fire detections (MCD14ML) together with land cover data (MOD12), (MOD44B), population data (Afripop) and information on land use drawn from the literature. A case study is presented for Ethiopia reporting on a 7-year period. Results show that 91% of fires occur in the woody savanna and savanna biomes, and fire activity is inversely correlated with population density. A 0.05° latitude/longitude grid is used to report fire density and indicated as more adequate than the existing 0.5° MODIS Climate Modelling Grid. Fire occurs with highest density in north-western Ethiopia, where smaller clusters of high fire activity are pointed out. Caveats and lessons learned are discussed in order to provide a best-practice methodology for country-level fire reporting.

Advances in satellite technologies, computing and web mapping have led to a huge increase in the number of people accessing satellite data, or satellite-derived information. Satellite images are routinely used in media reports, virtual globes and interactive maps. The increased exposure, and familiarization, of the general public to satellite data and products is leading to greater expectations about what data should be available and how they should be packaged. To meet these expectations, NASA's Land Atmosphere Near-real time Capability for EOS (LANCE) has refined the way in which users can browse, filter and retrieve satellite imagery for a particular area of interest. The developments on LANCE, part of the NASA Earth Data website, are largely user-driven based on interviews and interactions with end users. This paper describes the tools available at LANCE, key application areas supported and examples of how LANCE data are being used. All of the LANCE tools can be accessed through http://earthdata.nasa.gov/lance.

The NASA MODIS global fire data products are digital maps calculated from Terra and Aqua MODIS data, designed primarily to serve the needs of the emissions modeling community. The algorithms were designed to provide a comprehensive global product, and to perform well over the expected range of fire conditions and scene variability. The goal was to maximize product accuracy, and minimize errors of commission and omission. Two products exist, including one, which characterizes actively burning fire locations at satellite overpass time, and two, which depicts the area burned, also called fire-affected areas (URL 1). Since the launch of Terra and Aqua, the user community has expanded to include federal agencies with operational fire monitoring mandates and natural resource managers as well the intended global change researchers.

Technological advances have driven all aspects of Earth observation data, including improvements realized in sensor characteristics and capabilities, global data processing, near real-time monitoring, value-added products, and the distribution of global products. In particular, the growth of the World Wide Web is contributing to an increase in the global user base. The synergy of remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS), Internet, and mobile phone technologies is revolutionizing the way in which satellite-derived information is archived and distributed to users. The Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS), a NASA-funded application, is just one of many examples that illustrate the increasing ease with which Earth observation data are accessible to a broad range of users. This paper describes how the delivery of satellite-derived fire information has evolved over the last six years. By understanding user requirements and taking advantage of recent developments in areas such as information management, search, access, visualization, and enabling technologies, FIRMS has expanded the number and range of users that are able to access and utilize satellite-derived fire information. Specifically, we describe how satellite remote sensing and GIS technologies have been integrated to deliver MODIS active fire data to natural resource managers using Internet mapping services and customized e-mail alerts to users in more than 90 countries. We also describe how this web-based desktop application has been transitioned to a mobile service in South Africa to deliver fire information to field staff to warn of fires that may be potentially damaging to both natural resources and infrastructure.

We present a design case study of a near-real time alert system warning of vegetation fires that threaten to disrupt electricity flow along power transmission lines in South Africa. Fire is one of the main causes of outages on South Africa's extensive power grid. For Eskom (South Africa's largest electricity company), knowing where and when these fires occur saves money, resources and time. The system was primarily designed to provide the locations of vegetation fires, detected from satellite data, to the mobile phones of field supervisors via SMS (short message service). The system adapts an existing desktopaccessible internet application to provide fire alerts to nonexpert users via mobile phones. It demonstrates how usability and access to needed information is enhanced by changing the output to a mobile service.

We used the global fire detection record provided by the satellite-based Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to determine the number of fires detected inside 823 tropical and subtropical moist forest reserves and for contiguous buffer areas 5, 10, and 15 km wide. The ratio of fire detection densities (detections per square kilometer) inside reserves to their contiguous buffer areas provided an index of reserve effectiveness. Fire detection density was significantly lower inside reserves than in paired, contiguous buffer areas but varied by five orders of magnitude among reserves. The buffer : reserve detection ratio varied by up to four orders of magnitude among reserves within a single country, and median values varied by three orders of magnitude among countries. Reserves tended to be least effective at reducing fire frequency in many poorer countries and in countries beset by corruption. Countries with the most successful reserves include Costa Rica, Jamaica, Malaysia, and Taiwan and the Indonesian island of Java. Countries with the most problematic reserves include Cambodia, Guatemala, Paraguay, and Sierra Leone and the Indonesian portion of Borneo. We provide fire detection density for 3964 tropical and subtropical reserves and their buffer areas in the hope that these data will expedite further analyses that might lead to improved management of tropical reserves.