MYD14 v006

• Refinements to internal cloud mask, which sometimes flags heavy smoke as clouds.
• Fix for frequent false alarms occurring in the Amazon that are caused by small (~1 km²) clearings within forests.
• Fix to correct a bug that causes incorrect assessment of cloud and water pixels adjacent to fire pixels near the scan edge.
• Detects small fires using dynamic thresholding.
• Processes ocean and coastline pixels to detect fire from oil rigs.
• The Version 6 fire mask has the potential to detect fire over water pixels. Therefore, class 3 pixel values have been changed to be classified as “non-fire water pixels.”

Validation at stage 3 has been achieved for all MODIS Thermal Anomalies and Fire products. Further details regarding MODIS land product validation for the MYD14 data product is available from the MODIS land team validation site.

¹Additional Climate Modeling Grid (CMG) layers are also found among the SDSs. Those CMG layers contain information used for the generation of Level 4 CMG products.

MYD14 fire mask pixel classes

The quality layer is stored in an efficient bit-encoded manner. The unpack_sds_bits executable from the LDOPE Tools is available to the user community to help parse and interpret the quality layer.

The Quality Assessment (QA) bit flags for the quality layer are provided in Table 6 of the User Guide.

Quality assurance information should be considered when determining the usability of data for a particular science application. The ArcGIS MODIS-VIIRS Python Toolbox contains tools capable of decoding quality data layers while producing thematic quality raster files for each quality attribute.

Known issues are described on the MODIS/VIIRS Land Quality Assessment website and in Section 7.2 of the User Guide which covers Pre-November 2000 Data Quality, Detection Confidence, Flagging of Static Sources, and the August 2020 MODIS Aqua Outage.