SEVIRI Fire Radiative Power and the MACC

Monitoring and forecasting of the atmospheric composition in the GMES atmospheric environmental services will require boundary condition estimates of the smoke flux to the atmosphere due to biomass burning. The EUMETSAT Land SAF provides an operational fire radiative power (FRP) product based on the SEVIRI observations. The smoke flux calculated from this product is suitable for use in atmospheric services because (1) the product is available operationally in real time, (2) it has sufficient temporal and spatial resolutions and (3) FRP can be directly linked to the smoke emission rate. A case study of the Greek fires of August 2007 confirms that the aerosol optical depth is simulated accurately by combining the SEVIRI FRP observations with the GEMS/MACC atmospheric aerosol model. However, the geographical coverage of SEVIRI is limited to Africa and Europe (and a small part of South America). Therefore, MACC currently merges the SEVIRI FRP product with that from MODIS polar orbiting data in order to provide information on worldwide open vegetation fire activity variations and thus calculate the total global biomass burning smoke emission rate in real time. However, since the MODIS instrument cannot resolve the short-term and diurnal variations of the fire intensity appropriately enough for our purposes, the provision of FRP products from the other geostationary satellites currently operating around the globe would be highly beneficial for MACC