How Much of a Pixel Needs to Burn to Be Detected by Satellites? A Spectral Modeling Experiment Based on Ecosystem Data from Yellowstone National Park, USA

We present a simple modeling technique based on linear spectral mixture analysis to assess satellite detectability of sub-pixel burned area. Pixel observations are modeled using a linear combination of pure land covers, called endmembers. We executed an experiment using spectral data from Yellowstone National Park, USA. Using endmember samples from spectral libraries, pixel samples were assessed on burn detectability using the widely used differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR). While individual samples yielded differing results for Landsat 8, Sentinel-2, and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), the average park-wide detectability of burned area was consistent across satellites. For the commonly used dNBR threshold of 0.15, the results indicated that detectability is reached when around a quarter of a pixel’s area is burned. However, a significant percentage of the modeled burned pixels remained undetectable, especially those with low pre-fire vegetation cover. This has consequences for burned area estimates, as smaller fires in sparsely vegetated terrain may remain undetected in moderate resolution burned area products.