[1] A synthesis was carried out to analyze information available to quantify fire activity and burned area across North America, including a comparison of different data sources and an assessment of how variations in burned area estimate impact carbon emissions from fires. Data sets maintained by fire management agencies provide the longest record of burned area information. Canada and Alaska h...

An algorithm for burned area mapping in Africa based on classification trees was developed using SPOT-VEGETATION imagery. The derived 1 km spatial resolution maps were compared with 30 m resolution maps obtained with 13 Landsat scenes, through linear regression analysis. The procedure quantifies the bias in burned area estimation present in the low resolution burned area maps. Good corresponden...

Accurate production of regional burned area maps are necessary to reduce uncertainty in emission estimates from African savannah fires. Numerous methods have been developed that map burned and unburned surfaces. These methods are typically applied to coarse spatial resolution (1 km) data to produce regional estimates of the area burned, while higher spatial resolution (,30 m) data are used to a...

Global estimation of burned area using MODIS active fire observations L. Giglio, G. R. van der Werf, J. T. Randerson, G. J. Collatz, and P. Kasibhatla Science Systems and Applications, Inc., NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA Department of Hydrology and Geo-Environmental Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Department of Earth System Science, Universi...

We present a method for estimating monthly burned area globally at 1 spatial resolution using Terra MODIS data and ancillary vegetation cover information. Using regression trees constructed for 14 different global regions, MODIS active fire observations were calibrated to burned area estimates derived from 500-m MODIS imagery based on the assumption that burned area is proportional to counts of...

Long term, high quality estimates of burned area are needed for improving both prognostic and diagnostic fire emissions models and for assessing feedbacks between fire and the climate system. We developed global, monthly burned area estimates aggregated to 0.5 spatial resolution for the time period July 1996 through mid-2009 using four satellite data sets. From 2001–2009, our primary data sourc...

We estimate area burned in southern California at mid-century (2046–2065) for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change A1B scenario. We develop both regressions and a parameterization to predict area burned in three ecoregions, and apply present-day (1981–2000) and future meteorology from the suite of general circulation models to these fire prediction tools. The regressions account for th...