Fires are an important source of atmospheric trace gases and aerosols and they are the most important disturbance agent on a global scale. In addition, deforestation and tropical peatland fires and areas that see an increase in the frequency of fires add to the build-up of atmospheric CO2.

We have combined satellite information on fire activity and vegetation productivity to estimate gridded monthly burned area and fire emissions, as well as scalars that can be used to calculate higher temporal resolution emissions. Most of the resulting datasets are downloadable from this website for use in large-scale atmospheric and biogeochemical studies. The core datasets are:

The current version is 4 which has a spatial resolution of 0.25 degrees and is available from 1997 onwards. The most recent year is 2016 but monthly emissions are available for the period after 2016 (article in review).

Contact:

For questions regarding burned area (not small fire burned area), please contact Louis Giglio.

For questions regarding small fire burned area or the conversion of monthly to daily / 3-hourly emissions, please contact James Randerson.

For questions regarding emissions, please contact Guido van der Werf.

For questions regarding the fire atlas or VIIRS near real time emissions estimates, please contact Niels Andela.

Funding: