Atmospheric correction of VIIRS and MODIS fire radiative power retrievals for multi-sensor comparison

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensor aboard the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP) satellite was designed to provide data continuity to the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), which has been providing global active fire observations for over a decade. Fire radiative power (FRP) retrievals obtained from active fire satellite observations can be used for the estimation of biomass burning emissions. However, FRP estimates obtained from MODIS and VIIRS are not directly comparable due to the different spectral response of the bands used for the retrieval (figure 1), which may be further aggravated by differences in spatial sampling (e.g., VIIRS pixel aggregation scheme) and satellite orbits. In this paper we compared FRP retrievals from VIIRS and MODIS active fire products before and after atmospheric correction of the data showing an improved agreement of the FRP retrievals between both sensors after the application of the atmospheric correction.