The Fire Index is intended to smooth on a monthly basis the bias introduced by the system. Using monthly product data allows to get confidence in the results obtained from one year to the other. Fire Index construction. The example given highlights the construction of the Fire Index over all Africa for the month of January 1993 Processing sequence Selected products are used as input. Desert areas are automatically discarded.
Fire detection is performed at full resolution.
In case the operator is not confident with the product, it is rejected as a whole. The processing of a monthly Fire Index over Africa takes around 80 hours on a SUN Sparc Work Station. This processing time does not take into account the media handling which was carried out by an automatic Juke Box, neither the Ionia Quicklook inspection which is evaluated to be less than 30 seconds per product. Raw fires counting 4000 images have been processed over two years. Figure 3 shows the full-resolution raw results for the two consecutive years over Africa.