Investigating the impacts of satellite fire observation accuracy on the top-down nitrogen oxides emission estimation in northeastern Asia

NOx fire emissions greatly affect atmosphere and human society. The top-down NOx fire emission estimation is highly influenced by satellite fire observation performance (e.g., fire detection) by affecting the derivation of emission coefficient (EC) and fire radiative power (FRP) magnitude. However, such influence is lack of comprehensive study. Here, we developed an algorithm to evaluate such impacts in northeastern Asia using multi-source data during 2012–2019. Specifically, we extracted near-concurrent fire observations from MODIS and its successor VIIRS over their orbit-overlapping area and combined respectively with OMI NO2 concentration to derive NOx EC. We compared EC between MODIS and VIIRS, and defined a synergetic effect index (SEI) to explore the combined effects on NOx fire emission estimation due to potentially different ECs and FRP between the two sensors. Finally, we applied EC to estimate NOx emission and made comparison between MODIS and VIIRS. Results show that: 1) both sensors derived considerably higher NOx EC for low-biomass vegetation fires (e.g., grassland fires) than other vegetation fires; however, MODIS EC is about 30% lower than VIIRS EC while similar values are derived for forest fires; 2) synergetic effects induced by different ECs and FRP magnitudes between the two sensors are more significant during fall and winter than in spring and summer; 3) annual NOx emissions based on MODIS EC are 15–23% lower than that from VIIRS EC during 2012–2019, while both are lower than the conventional bottom-up emission inventories GFED and FINN by an average of 23–44%; nevertheless, the EC-based NOx estimations presented high spatiotemporal correlation of R usually between 0.70 and 0.95 with GFED and FINN. These results reveal and quantify the critical impacts of satellite fire observation performance on EC derivation and fire emission estimation, which is helpful in reducing estimation uncertainty.