Advances in the Collection 6 MODIS Burned Area Product for Global and Regional Fire Monitoring

Over the past sixteen years the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) fire products have achieved widespread use in a broad range of studies and applications. Here we describe major enhancements made to the Collection 6 MODIS MCD64A1 burned area product, which provides global, daily burned area observations at 500-m spatial resolution from mid-2000 through the present. Globally, the Collection 6 product maps approximately 20% more burned area than the Collection 5.1 product, with the majority of this additional area occurring in savanna. On a relative basis, the most significant increases occurred in tropical forest and cropland (both 2×), largely as a result of a substantially improved ability to detect small burns. Included in our discussion are some preliminary results of our global validation.