The ESA climate change initiative: Merging burned area estimates for the Fire Essential Climate Variable

The ESA Fire Essential Climate Variable provides a 1km pixel and 0.5 degree grid burned area product by merging several burned area data sets to a set of user requirements for the climate, atmospheric and ecological modeling communities. A description of the merging is given from preliminary results during the first phase of the project. Allowing for errors, some contributed to by ongoing algorithm development, results are reported for a test site in northern Australia. In the pixel product 50-60% of the burned areas corresponded in at least two data sets allowing for an improvement on the earliest detection date and the confidence level of a burn. The grid product shows good spatial and temporal consistency in burned area whilst providing further information on measures of confidence, cloudiness, burned area patchiness and dominant vegetation burned, useful information for modeling burning dynamics.