Monitoring Global Land Surface Phenology and Biomass Burning Emissions Using Polar-orbiting and Geostationary Satellite Data

Event Date: October 3, 2019

Guest Speaker: Xioayang Zhang, Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence, Geography & Geospatial Sciences, South Dakota State University

Time/Date: 12—1 PM October 7 (Monday)

Location: Room T-124, Steinman Hall, Grove School of Engineering, The City College of New York, 140th Street and Convent Avenue, New York, NY 10031

Time: 12 PM

Abstract: Satellite remote sensing has been widely applied for monitoring global environmental changes.Although polar-orbiting satellites can provide a repeat cycle of one day with relatively high spatial resolution, the frequency of land surface observation with good quality is still very low because of cloud contaminations. This limitation could cause large uncertainties in the monitoring of seasonal land surface dynamics. Geostationary satellites, on the other hand, have the capability to provide frequent diurnal observations, which allow us to obtain a larger number of cloud-free observations relative to polar-orbiting satellites. Thus, geostationary satellites are particularly important for monitoring seasonal dynamics of vegetation growth and diurnal variation in fire activities. This presentation will introduce the studies of polar-orbiting and geostationary satellites on global land surface phenology detections and biomass burning emissions estimates. For monitoring global environmental changes and generating climate data record, a long-term land surface phenology products is produced from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) data. However, geostationary satellites have advantages in land surface phenology detections in the cloud-prone regions. For monitoring and forecasting air quality, biomass burning emissions (BBE) are estimated in near real time by blending polar-orbiting and geostationary satellite observations. Specifically, the MODIS Fire Radiative Power (FRP) flux is first employed to calculate daily BBE using a coefficient that is determined by comparing the FRP flux with MODIS aerosol optical depth. By taking MODIS-FRP-derived BBE as a reference, FRP retrieved from VIIRS and geostationary satellites are respectively associated to daily biomass burning emissions. Finally, BBE estimates from different satellites are integrated to produce daily global product with a latency of one day. This global daily BBE product is to be improved for the estimation of diurnal BBE using new generation geostationary satellites.

Bio: Dr. Xiaoyang Zhang is a Professor with the Department of Geography and a Senior Scientist at the Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence at South Dakota State University. Before coming to SDSU, he was a Research Assistant Professor with the Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) (1984-1988); a Research Associate Professor with the Institute of Geodesy and Geophysics, CAS (1988-1995); a Research Associate and Research Assistant Professor with the Department of Geography, Boston University, Boston, MA (1999 to 2005). As a Senior Research Scientist in the Earth Resources Technology (2005-2012) and a visiting Associate Research Scientist in the University of Maryland (2012-2013), he worked at the NOAA/NESDIS/STAR. Dr. Zhang’s research is focused on examining land surface dynamics and climate impacts using remotely sensed data across the globe. He leads the development of a continuous dataset of global land surface phenology from AVHRR and MODIS data since 1981, the generation of global phenology product and the establishment of an operational system for real-time monitoring of phenological development from Suomi NPP VIIRS data. His research effort also focuses on algorithm development and product delivery of near-real-time global biomass burning emissions from polar-orbit satellites and geostationary satellites, which includes fuel loading estimates, fuel moisture detections, burned area measurements, and diurnal fire radiative power analysis. Moreover, his research includes the investigation of climate impacts on land surface dynamics using the products retrieved from long-term satellite data.