AVHRR multitemporal compositing techniques for burned land mapping

The performance of several criteria to generate multitemporal composites of daily AVHRR images for burned land mapping was tested on some large fires affecting the Iberian Peninsula. The experiment was based on four tests that assessed the discriminability between burned and unburned areas, the presence of artefacts, the verticality of the viewing angle, and the spatial coherency. The maximum temperature was found to be the most appropriate compositing technique for burned land mapping, since it provides the highest performance for the four assessments, with close to maximum discrimination power, no clouds or cloud shadows, high spatial coherency and close to nadir observation angles. Traditional compositing criterion based on maximizing NDVI values provided the lowest ranks in most tests.