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Author(s):
Stephane Mangeon, Robert Field, Michael Fromm, Charles W. McHugh, Apostolos Voulgarakis
Year Published:

Cataloging Information

Topic(s):
Fire Effects

NRFSN number: 13620
Record updated:

North American wildfire management teams routinely assess burned area on site during firefighting campaigns; meanwhile, satellite observations provide systematic and global burned-area data. Here we compare satellite and ground-based daily burned area for wildfire events for selected large fires across North America in 2007 on daily timescales. In a sample of 26 fires across North America, we found the Global Fire Emissions Database Version 4 (GFED4) estimated about 80% of the burned area logged in ground-based Incident Status Summary (ICS-209) over 8-day analysis windows. Linear regression analysis found a slope between GFED and ICS-209 of 0.67 (with R = 0.96). The agreement between these data sets was found to degrade at short timescales (from R = 0.81 for 4-day to R = 0.55 for 2-day). Furthermore, during large burning days (> 3000 ha) GFED4 typically estimates half of the burned area logged in the ICS-209 estimates.

Citation

Mangeon, Stephane; Field, Robert; Fromm, Michael; McHugh, Charles; Voulgarakis, Apostolos. 2015. Satellite versus ground-based estimates of burned area: a comparison between MODIS based burned area and fire agency reports over North America in 2007. The Anthropocene Review. doi: 10.1177/2053019615588790

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