Forest fires are defined as uncontrolled fires often occurring in
wildland areas, but that can also affect houses or agricultural resources.
Causes are both natural (e.g.,lightning phenomena) and anthropogenic
(human negligence or arsons).Major environmental factors influencing
the fire ignition and propagation are climate and vegetation. Wildfires
are most common and severe during drought period and on windy days.
Moreover, under water-stress conditions, which occur after a long
hot and dry period, the vegetation is more vulnerable to fire.
These conditions are common in the United State and Canada, where
forest fires represent a big problem. We focused our analysis on
the state of Florida, for which a big dataset on forest fires detection
is readily available. USDA Forest Service Remote Sensing Application
Center, in collaboration with NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center and
the University of Maryland, has compiled daily MODIS Thermal Anomalies
(fires and biomass burning images) produced by NASA using a contextual
algorithm that exploits the strong emission of mid-infrared radiation
from fires. Fire classes were converted in GIS format: daily MODIS
fire detections are provided as the centroids of the 1 kilometer
pixels and compiled into daily Arc/INFO point coverage.