Update of: The Global Fire Atlas of individual fire size, duration, speed and direction

This is an updated and extended record of the Global Fire Atlas introduced by Andela et al. (2019). Input data (burned area and land cover products) are updated to the MODIS Collection 6.1 (the previous version was based on collection 6.0 burned area and collection 5.1 land cover products, respectively). The timeseries is extended to cover the period 2002 to February 2024.

Methodological Notes:

The method employed to create the dataset precisely follows the approach described by Andela et al. (2019).

The input burned area product is MCD64A1 Collection 6.1. It is described by Giglio et al. (2018) and available at: https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mcd64a1v061/. 

The input land cover product is MCD12Q1 Collection 6.1. It is described by Sulla-Menashe et al. (2019) and available at: https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/products/mcd12q1v061/. 

Note that while the methods have remained the same compared to Andela et al. (2019), we do observe small differences between the Global Fire Atlas products originating from differences between the MCD64A1 collection 6.1 burned area data used here and the collection 6 data used in the original product. In addition, we observe more substantial differences in the dominant land cover class associated with each fire due to the differences between the MCD12Q1 collection 6.1 data used here and collection 5.1 data used in the original product. 

The original dataset included time series from 2003 to 2016, including the full fire season for each year. For each MODIS tile, the fire season is defined as the twelve months centred on the month with peak burend area (see Andela et al., 2019). Here we extended the time-series to include the fire season of 2002, and extended the time-series until February 2024. Therefore, both the 2023 and 2024 files will contain incomplete records. For example, for a MODIS tile with peak burned area in December, the 2023 fire season would be defined as the period from July 2023 to June 2024, with the current record ending in February 2024. For the purpose of time-series analysis, we note that the 2002 product may have been affected by outages of Terra-MODIS (most notably, June 15 2001 - July 3 2001 and March 19 2002 - March 28 2002), which affects the burn date estimates and Global Fire Atlas product. Following the launch of Aqua-MODIS in May 2002 burn date estimates are more reliable as estimated from both MODIS sensors onboard Terra and Aqua.  

Usage Notes:

Table 1: Overview of the Global Fire Atlas data layers. The shapefiles of ignition locations (point) and fire perimeters (polygon) contain attribute tables with summary information for each individual fire, while the underlying 500 m gridded layers reflect the day-to-day behavior of the individual fires. In addition, we provide aggregated monthly summary layers at a 0.25° resolution for regional and global analyses.

File name
Content

SHP_ignitions.zip
Shapefiles of ignition locations with attribute tables (see Table 2)

SHP_perimeters.zip
Shapefiles of final fire perimeters with attribute tables (see Table 2)

GeoTIFF_direction.zip
500 m resolution daily gridded data on direction of spread (8 classes)

GeoTIFF_day_of_burn.zip
500 m resolution daily gridded data on day of burn (day of year; 1-366)

GeoTIFF_speed.zip
500 m resolution daily gridded data on speed (km/day)

GeoTIFF_fire_line.zip
500 m resolution daily gridded data on the fire line (day of year; 1-366)

GeoTIFF_monthly_summaries.zip
Aggregated 0.25° resolution monthly summary layers. These files include the sum of ignitions, average size (km2), average duration (days), average daily fire line (km), average daily fire expansion (km2/day), average speed (km/day), and dominant direction of spread (8 classes). 

Table 2: Overview of the Global Fire Atlas shapefile attribute tables. The shapefiles of ignition locations (point) and fire perimeters (polygon) contain attribute tables with summary information for each individual fire.

Attribute
Explanation / units

lat, lon
Coordinates of ignition location (°)

size
Fire size (km2)

perimeter
Fire perimeter (km)

start_date, start_DOY
Start date (yyyy-mm-dd), start day of year (1-366)

end_date, end_DOY
End date (yyyy-mm-dd), end day of year (1-366)

duration
Duration (days)

fire_line
Average length of daily fire line (km)

spread
Average daily fire growth (km2/day)

speed
Average speed (km/day)

direction, direc_frac
Dominant direction of spread (N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW) and associated fraction

MODIS_tile
MODIS tile id

landcover, landc_frac
MCD12Q1 dominant land cover class and fraction (UMD classification), provided for 2002-2023

GFED_regio
GFED region (van der Werf et al., 2017; available at https://www.globalfiredata.org/)

File Naming Convention:

GFA_v{time-stamp}_{data-type}_{fire_season}.{file_type}

{time-stamp} = Date that code was run.

{data-type} = “ignitions” or “perimeters” for vector files; “day_of_burn”, “direction”, “fire_line”, or “speed” for raster files.

{fire_season} = the locally-defined fire season in which the fire was ignited (see more below).

{file_type} = ".shp" for vector files; ".tif" for raster files. 

Fire Season Convention:

Please note that the year string in filenames refers to the locally-defined fire season in which the fire ignited, not the calendar year. Hence the file GFA_v20240409_perimeters_2003.shp can include fires from the 2003 fire season that ignited in the calendar years 2002 or 2004. This is particularly relevant in the Southern extratropics and the northern hemisphere subtropics, where the fire seasons often span the new year. The local definition of the fire season is based on climatological peak in burned area as described by Andela et al. (2019).

Projections:

Vector data are provided on the WGS84 projection.

Raster data are provided on the MODIS sinusoidal projection used in NASA tiled products.