The surface flames in porous ceramic burner are experimentally characterized to investigate the effects of equivalence ratio and firing rates. The results show that the surface flames are classified into green, red radiant and blue surface flame as decrease of equivalence ratio. And each flame is maintained very stably and shows the same flame characteristics at any orientation of ceramic burner. Particularly the blue surface flame was found to be very stable at very lean equivalence ratio at 200 to $800;kw/m^2$ firing rates. And the exhausted NOx was analysed to find out which flame has lower NOx emission. The blue surface flame showed the lowest NOx emission regardless of the location of burner since it sustained very stable at lean mixture ratio.