GFIMS obtains the MODIS Burned Area data in HDF (Hierarchical Data Format) from the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP-DAAC) and processes them to produce global images for each calendar month using a custom color scale. The burned area images are derived from the 500m HDF files and resampled into Spatial resolutions of 16, 8, 4 and 2 km. These images are displayed in Web Fire Mapper.

The production of a single month of burned area detection requires a time series of 90 daily observations - the data for the month prior to and the month after the calendar month being processed are used. For example, to produce the calendar month data for September 2008, GFIMS uses the data from August 2008 and October 2008, in addition to September 2008. For this reason, the most recent monthly burned area image will only be available approximately 2 - 3 months behind the current month.

The burned areas are displayed in Web Fire Mapper using a rainbow color scale, with each color representing the approximate day of burning in a given calendar month. The legend shown for burned area images are for a 31 day month. For a month with 28, 29 or 30 days, only the first 28, 29 or 30 colors are used. Depending on the zoom level, the pixel size of the images displayed in Web Fire Mapper range from 16 km to 2 km.

GFIMS Web Fire Mapper displays images that cover exactly a calendar month, while the standard Collection 5 MCD45 product has an overlap of 8 days between consecutive months. This overlap is removed using the method described in Roy et al., 2008 and Boschetti et al., 2008. As already mentioned above, the pre-processing uses data for the month prior to and the month after the calendar month being processed.

Click here to view MODIS Burned Area images in Web Fire Mapper