The World Fire Web: proposal of a new discriminant function to increase the fire detection accuracy at global level

The World Fire Web (WFW) is an image processing system developed by the European Commission, which contributes to better understanding the spatial-temporal distribution of global fire activity by detecting active fires. This system has been up-graded to process NOAA-AVHRR Pathfinder data in order to create long time series of active fire maps at the global scale for environmental studies. A first analysis of the original WFW products showed that the detection errors could vary from 95% in regions where the fire activity occur during the dry season to 5% between 60deg and 40deg latitude in the wet season. With the analysis of the spatial and temporal distribution of errors produced by the detection algorithm, this paper proposes and describes a new discriminant function which increases the detection accuracy of the system to greater than 95%