National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Goddard Space Flight Center

Burned Area

The Burned Area product contains burning and quality information on a per-pixel basis. Produced from both the Terra and Aqua MODIS-derived daily surface reflectance inputs, the algorithm analyzes the daily surface reflectance dynamics to locate rapid changes, and uses that information to detect the approximate date of burning, mapping the spatial extent of recent fires only. It provides varied quality assessment information and a single summary quality assessment score for each pixel.The algorithm improves on previous methods by using a BRDF model-based change detection approach to handle angular variations in the data and uses a statistical measure to identify change probability from a previously observed state.