Draft:Fire Radiative Power

Fire padiative power (commonly abbreviated as FRP) is a measure used to quantify the energy emitted by fires. It is used in the geosciences to measure the scale and intensity of wildfires, and to estimate their emissions.

Fire radiative power is technically defined as the rate of thermal radiative energy emitted by a burning fire, summed over the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and integrated over a hemisphere above the fire. It is commonly expressed in units of Watts (Joules per second) or, for most real-world measurements of large fires, megawatts (MW).

Instrumentation and Use
FRP may be measured by various commercial sensors, as it is simply a measurement of radiation intensity. For large-scale Earth-system research, it is typically only practical to measure it with satellite-borne sensors. This is because land fires are inherently unpredictable and temporary, as well as often occurring in remote locations and spread across the globe.

Some active satellite fire sensors are the VIIRS instrument on the SUOMI satellite, the MODIS instrument on both the Terra and Aqua satellite, the SEVIRI instrument on the Meteosat satelite, the SLSTR on the Sentinel-3A and -3B satellites, and the ABI instrument on the GOES satellite.

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