Western US MTBS-Interagency (WUMI) wildfire dataset

Area burned is an important variable for measuring wildfire activity. In the western United States (US), the timing and magnitude of area burned can be associated with meteorological and human activity to find the drivers of wildfire activity, but this type of research is dependent on the spatial and temporal resolution of available wildfire datasets. The Western US MTBS-Interagency (WUMI2) database is a dataset of wildfire events in the western United States (US) larger than 1 km2 for 1984 to 2020. WUMI2 includes the important Monitoring Trends in Burned Severity (MTBS) project (Eidenshink et al., 2007)—a Landsat satellite-based dataset of large fires (>4.04 km2)—and adds small (>1 to 4.04 km2) and large fires from government agency databases, including from the Fire Program Analysis (FPA) fire-occurrence database (Short et al., 2022). We performed extensive quality control to merge the datasets together and remove errors. The result is a western US-wide dataset with accurate fire frequency, timing, and area burned that can be used for analyses and modeling of wildfire activity. The current version of this data is WUMI2. The first iteration of the dataset (WUMI1) was published and described in Juang et al. (2022).