MODIS Burned Area Product
 Background
Mapping the timing and the extent of fires is important as fire is a prominent change agent affecting ecosystem structure, the cycling of carbon and nutrients and is a globally-significant cause of greenhouse gas emission. The availability of robustly calibrated, atmospherically corrected, cloud-screened, geolocated data provided by the latest generation of moderate resolution remote sensing systems allows for major advances in satellite mapping of fire affected area. A complementary MODIS algorithm defined to map burned areas has been developed and the first global MODIS Burned Area Product from 2000 onwards is now being generated as part of the MODIS Land Collection 5 Product Suite.
The MODIS Burned Area Product (MCD45A1) is a monthly Level 3 gridded 500m product containing per-pixel burning and quality information, and tile-level metadata. The Burned Area Product (MCD45A1) was developed by the MODIS Fire Team at the University of Maryland and is available in HDF and GeoTIFF format on the MODIS Active Fire and Burned Area Products website. Please also refer to the MODIS Burned Area User Guide, Version 2.0 for further information regarding the algorithm, data formats and how to handle the data with commercial software packages.
MODIS Burned Area in FIRMS Web Fire Mapper
Click here to view MODIS Burned Area images in Web Fire Mapper
FIRMS obtains the MODIS Burned Area data in HDF (Hierarchical Data Format) from the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP-DAAC) and processes them to produce global images for each calendar month using a custom color scale. The burned area images are derived from the 500m HDF files and resampled into spatial resolutions of 16, 8, 4 and 2 km. These images are displayed in Web Fire Mapper. The production of a single month of burned area detection requires a time series of 90 daily observations - the data for the month prior to and the month after the calendar month being processed are used. For example, to produce the calendar month data for September 2008, FIRMS uses the data from August 2008 and October 2008, in addition to September 2008. For this reason, the most recent monthly burned area image will only be available approximately 2 - 3 months behind the current month.
MODIS Burned Area Display in Web Fire Mapper
The burned areas are displayed in Web Fire Mapper using a rainbow color scale, with each color representing the approximate day of burning in a given calendar month. The legend shown for burned area images are for a 31 day month. For a month with 28, 29 or 30 days, only the first 28, 29 or 30 colors are used. Depending on the zoom level, the pixel size of the images displayed in Web Fire Mapper range from 16 km to 2 km.
FIRMS Web Fire Mapper displays images that cover exactly a calendar month, while the standard Collection 5 MCD45 product has an overlap of 8 days between consecutive months. This overlap is removed using the method described in Roy et al., 2008 and Boschetti et al., 2008. As already mentioned above, the pre-processing uses data for the month prior to and the month after the calendar month being processed.
Please note:
- The Burned Area product is available April 2000 onwards;
- The data for June 2001 is not available due to prolonged sensor outage;
- Because of the June 2001 outage, the May and July 2001 products are also affected, and some burned areas might not have been detected.
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