GeoStationary Fire data for Developing Countries

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Developing countries are the site of most landscape burning worldwide. They burn the most peatland and forest, have the highest deforestation and net fire-related greenhouse gas emissions, squander economic opportunity by burning agricultural residues, have infrastructure such as power lines and resources such as forest plantations and protected areas at risk from fire, and experience the most recurrent and worst air pollution events associated with landscape burning. Atmospheric impacts spread far beyond national borders, making this a regional problem through the spread of pollution, and a global problem through impacts on climate from carbon emissions. Billions of dollars have been spent on the ground- and space-based infrastructure necessary to provide real-time, continuous remote sensing observations that support meteorological forecasts worldwide. Our Project will harness this infrastructure in order to benefit developing country users who, because of the above issues, require accurate, actionable, and extremely up-to-date information on the location and characteristics of wildfires in their area of interest, and on the smoke that these fires are releasing into the atmosphere.Our project will make available real-time, accurate and actionable information on landscape fires and fire emissions through a combination of work by the UK team and our overseas partners. This new information will cover dozens of DAC-list countries in the tropics and sub-tropics that experience significant challenges from landscape burning, and so the benefits will be regional throughout the tropics and sub-tropics, rather than to only a few nations. We will use a source of new continuous and real-time (10 to 15 minute update frequency) meteorological satellite data to provide this real-time intelligence on wildfire state, exploiting algorithms developed under NERC funded research and working with Partners (IPMA, Portugal and UNAM, Mexico) who will implement these algorithms in their own satellite data processing chains to provide 24-hr guaranteed (99%) information availability on landscape fires. The resulting real-time wildfire information will be made available to users in all developing nations through the already extremely widely used Advanced Fire Information System (AFIS) run by our Partner CSIR, South Africa, who have tens of thousands of users already and as a result of this new pan-tropical information will greatly extend their reach throughout the tropics since this highest temporal resolution data is currently only available at the highest quality over North and West Africa. Our project will also provide the information required to turn the real-time fire information into real-time estimates of fire emissions - particularly focusing on health-impacting particulate matter and total carbon emissions, which will benefit developing country users who are focused on health-impacting particulate and GHG emissions assessments and the national programmes aimed at their reduction. Overall our project will provide a real step-change in actionable fire information available in the developing countries of South and Southeast Asia, Southern and East Africa, Mexico, Central and South America. Institutions and individuals in these regions will be able to identify fires burning close to power lines and/or other important critical infrastructure in order to take action (e.g. temporarily turn off the power line letting the fire pass underneath without problems), that have started within or close to forest reserves, plantations or protected areas (with the potential to dispatch fire response crews in a far more timely manner than currently), and which are impacting health and national GHG emissions (with information now available to better quantify these, ultimately in support at efforts to reduce them and thus gain through health improvements and/or REDD+ schemes. Keywords: Wildfires, smoke, satellites, infrastructure and area protection.