LAUSR

Abstract The Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) now operates concurrently onboard the European Sentinel-3A and 3B satellites. Its observations are expected ultimately to become the main global source of active fire (AF) detections and fire radiative power (FRP) retrievals for the mid-morning and evening low earth orbit timeslots – data currently supplied by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard Terra. Here we report for the first-time the significant adjustments made to the pre-launch Sentinel-3 AF detection and fire characterisation algorithm required to optimize its performance with real SLSTR data collected from the Sentinel-3A and 3B satellites. SLSTR possesses both an S7 ‘standard’ and an F1 ‘fire’ channel that operate in the same middle infrared (MIR) waveband, but which use different detectors with differing dynamic ranges and which are located at different focal plane locations. When S7 provides saturated observations, for example over higher FRP active fire pixels, F1 must be used to provide a reliable MIR spectral measurement. However, the two channels differing data characteristics (slightly different size, shape and spatial location of the matching pixels) means that swapping between their measurements is non-trivial. The main algorithm enhancement has therefore been the addition of a dedicated active fire pixel clustering component, required to cluster the detected AF pixels into individual fires as a solution to this issue. Focusing on night-time data due to the added complexity of daytime implementation, we compare AF information derived with this updated SLSTR algorithm to that from near-simultaneous MODIS Terra, and we find that SLSTR has a lower minimum FRP detection limit which enables more lower FRP active fire pixels to be identified than is the case with MODIS. When both sensors detect the same fire cluster at the same time, SLSTR typically measures a slightly higher FRP due to it being able to detect more of the low FRP AF pixels lying at the cluster edge (the OLS linear best fit between matched SLSTR and MODIS per-fire FRP matchups has a slope of 1.08). At the regional scale, SLSTR detects 90% of the AF pixels that the matching MODIS data contains, but also identifies an additional 44% more AF pixels – the vast majority of which have FRP