New Product! Historic AVHRR-derived Burned Area product and validation for Siberia (1979 - 2000): Invited Paper 491463

Siberia is a distinct and critical region that has the physical size necessary to effect regional and global climate. The lack of accurate historic data on Russian boreal fire regimes has severely constrained efforts to develop fire databases for the whole circumboreal zone, which could be used to forecast climate change impacts in this carbon-rich region, an issue of growing global interest and concern. The circumboreal zone contains the largest stock of terrestrial carbon on Earth, and Russia holds roughly two-thirds of that carbon pool. Fire is the dominant natural disturbance in boreal forest, which acts to cycle carbon and maintain ecosystem diversity in sync with the climate. Under current climate change scenarios, the Russian boreal is expected to experience temperature increases that far exceed the global mean.

In this talk, we present a long-term burned area database that has been developed using Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Global Area Coverage (GAC) data from 1979-2000. Burned area has been verified using Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer data and validated using available Landsat imagery (160 scenes thus far representing 5.6 Mha of burned area, 219 fire events, and 11% of the total burned area in the AVHRR database). Visually the burned scar data compare well. Validation is in ongoing, though initial analyses show an intersection of 42% with commission and omission errors of 31% and 25%, respectively. Most commission and omission errors are related to spatial inconsistencies using imagery with significantly different spatial resolutions. Of the fire events missed by AVHRR (omissions), 86% are related to fires <10,000 ha (6 GAC pixels) and 44% are related to fires <3,000ha (2 GAC pixels). Total burned area compares well, with the AVHRR database under-representing burned area by 10% compared to the Landsat data analyzed. Correlation in burned scar area between the AVHRR and Landsat data is 0.98 for all fires and 0.68 for fires that are < 0.1 Mha.

This long-term burned area database will enable novel analyses on the multi-decadal time scales that are required for robust assessments, including those focused on the carbon cycle, fire emissions, and the crucial links between fire regimes, fire weather, altered ecosystems, and climate.