Spectral characteristics of deforestation fires in NOAA/AVHRR images

Abstract
This work presents optical-spectral and radiometric characteristics of fires associated to tropical deforestation as recorded by full resolution AVHRR/NOAA-9 images in the Amazon region during a dry season. Results showed that fires and smoke clouds were spectrally distinct and easily separated from surrounding ground covers by automatic digital processing. Channel 3 (3–55 to 3–93 /*m) was the most appropriate to identify active fires whose pixels had digital counts about one order of magnitude higher than common ground covers.