The size and severity of wildland fires in the Western United States has expanded in recent years. Observations of long term trends in fire size and severity necessarily rely heavily on remotely sensed data. Satellite derived indices of burn severity are insensitive to the magnitude of biomass loss during a fire making comparisons of burn severity across space and time difficult.
The VIIRS satellite has unique nighttime imaging capability allowing the nightly detection and quantification of combustion sources. This study uses VIIRS data in conjunction with Planck’s Law to estimate the temperature and energy release during the Pole Creek fire in central Oregon. These estimates are related to pre-fire biomass and the differenced normalized burn ratio (dNBR) to examine the potential incorporation of VIIRS data into estimates of burn severity. A linear regression found a significant relationship when pre-fire biomass was compared to integrated temperature and dNBR (r2=0.27). This study finds that use of VIIRS data shows promise for improving remotely sensed metrics of burn severity.