GOES-Observed Fire Event Representation (GOFER) product for 28 California wildfires from 2019-2021

The GOES-Observed Fire Event Representation (GOFER) algorithm uses geostationary satellite observations of active fires from GOES-East and GOES-West to map the hourly progression of large wildfires (over 50,000 acres or 202 sq. km). GOES observes North and South America with a spatial resolution of 2 km at the equator and at a frequency of 10-15 minutes for the full disk view. Along with the fire perimeter, we derive the active fire lines and fire spread rates. We tested the GOFER algorithm on a set of 28 wildfires in California from 2019-2021 and produced three versions of the product: GOFER-Combined, GOFER-East, and GOFER-West. GOFER-Combined uses both GOES-East and GOES-West observations, while GOFER-East and GOFER-West use only GOES-East and only GOES-West observations, respectively. We find that GOFER performs reasonably well compared to final perimeters from California's Fire and Resource Assessment Program (FRAP) and 12-hourly perimeters from the Fire Event Data Suite (FEDS), derived from 375-m active fire observations. See our GOFER Visualization app on Earth Engine Apps for an overview of the dataset, alongside other datasets, such as FEDS and FRAP perimeters and 30-m burn severity from Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS). Please refer to the corresponding GitHub repository for the code, detailed dataset description, and version history.