National Aeronautics and Space Administration

The three available global multi-annual burned area products (L3JRC, GLOBCARBON and MODIS) are validated for a burning season across southern Africa. A comprehensive validation is undertaken using the same independent reference data and using the same validation and reporting protocol. The independent reference data were derived by interpreting multi-temporal Landsat ETM+ data to map the location and approximate date of burning at 11 Landsat scenes distributed across southern Africa and covering approximately 295,000 km2. The accuracy of the products was quantified using metrics derived from confusion matrices, to characterize product accuracy for local applications; and using metrics derived through a linear regression on a 5x5km grid, to characterize product accuracy for coarser scale applications. Quantitative results are described and the differences between the products discussed.