Evaluating the near and mid infrared bi-spectral space for assessing fire severity and comparison with the differenced normalized burn ratio

Fire severity, defined as the degree of environmental change caused by a fire, is a critical fire regime attribute of interest to fire emissions modelling and post-fire rehabilitation planning. Remotely sensed fire severity is traditionally assessed by the differenced normalized burned ratio (dNBR). This spectral index captures fire-induced reflectance changes in the near infrared (NIR) and short-wave infrared (SWIR) spectral regions. This study evaluates a spectral index based on a band combination including the NIR and mid infrared (MIR) spectral regions, the differenced normalized difference vegetation index (dNDVI_MID), to assess fire severity. This evaluation capitalized upon the unique opportunity stemming from the pre- and post-fire airborne acquisitions over the Rim (2013) and King (2014) fires in California with the MODIS/ASTER (MASTER) instrument. The field data consists of 85 Geometrically structured Composite Burn Index (GeoCBI) plots. In addition, six different index combinations, respectively three with a NIR-SWIR combination and three with a NIR-MIR combination, were evaluated based on the optimality of fire-induced spectral displacements. The optimality statistic ranges between zero and one, with values of one representing pixel displacements that are unaffected by noise. Results show that the dNBR demonstrated a stronger relationship with GeoCBI field data when field measurements over the two fire scars were combined than the dNDVI_MID approaches. The results yielded an R² of 0.68 based on a saturated growth model for the best performing dNBR index, whereas the performance of the dNDVI_MID indices was clearly lower with an R² = 0.61 for the best performing dNDVI_MID index. The dNBR also outperformed the dNDVI_MID in terms of spectral optimality across both fires. The best performing dNBR index yielded the optimality statistics of 0.56 over the Rim and 0.60 over the King fire. The best performing dNDVI_MID, index recorded optimality values of 0.49 over the Rim and 0.46 over the King fire. We also found that the dNBR approach led to considerable differences in the form of the relationship with the GeoCBI between the two fires, whereas the dNDVI_MID approach yielded comparable relationships with the GeoCBI over the two fires. This suggests that the dNDVI_MID approach, despite its slightly lower performance than the dNBR, may be a more robust method for estimating and comparing fire severity over large regions. This premise needs additional verification when more air- or spaceborne imagery with NIR and MIR bands will become available with a spatial resolution that allows ground truthing of fire severity.