Monitoring atmospheric composition & climate

FIR Global Fire Monitoring

The D-FIRE sub-project provides global emissions from biomass burning to the other MACC services and to the general public. The emissions are calculated in real time and retrospectively from satellite-based observations of open fires.

NEW: Daily global distribution of open biomass burning with 0.1deg resolution (GFASv1.1): KML

...and with 0.5deg resolution (GFASv1.0): GIF, KML, NetCDF (FZ Jülich), NetCDF (GEIA, 1 month behind real time)

See also recent MODIS hot spot observations: KML (FAO)

Latest Observed Distribution of Fire Radiative Power

The map represents the thermal radiation measured from space-borne sensors and detected as coming from actively burning vegetation and other open fires. It is expressed as the daily average of the fire radiative power (FRP) observations made in 125 km grid cells and expressed in the units of [mW/m²]. The rate of release of thermal radiation by a fire is believed to be related to the rate at which fuel is being consumed and smoke produced. Therefore, these daily averaged FRP areal intensity data are used in the global estimation of open vegetation fire trace gas and particulate emissions, which are passed onto the other MACC services for incorporation as model source terms. The data are derived from FRP observations by the SEVIRI and MODIS instruments, which are provided by the EUMETSAT LSA SAF and NASA, respectively. Earlier maps are also available for the past 365 days.

Highlight: Spaghetti Plots of Continental-scale Combustion (up to 21 April 2013)

The plots below show the daily development of the fire activity in 2013, up to 21 April, compared to previous years. (Click on the image for a version with high resolution.)

Previous Highlights

Please see our dedicated web page for more highlights.

Latest Smoke Distribution Forecasts

Organic matter, black carbon and sulfate aerosols are emitted from fires and other, mostly anthropogenic, sources. They are called "anthropogenic aerosols" in MACC and the latest forecast of their aerosol optical depth (AOD), including emissions derived from the latest observed fire distribution and assimilation of space-borne AOD observations, is available HERE.

Fire Products

Our pre-operational products are available from the Fire Emission Service web page.
The GFED data are available here.
Custom products created following individual user requests are available on a dedicated web page.
All fire products in the MARS archive at ECMWF are listed on this web page.
If you cannot find what you are looking for, please contact us.

The Team

Angelika Heil, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany
Guido van der Werf, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Johannes Kaiser, King's College London, ECMWF, Max-Planck-Institut für Chemie (lead)
Martin Schultz, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany
Martin Wooster, King's College London, UK
Guido van der Werf, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Rob Detmers, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Ronan Paugam, King's College London, UK
Pedro Viterbo, Instituto de Meteorologia, Portugal
Samuel Remy, ECMWF, UK

Recent Publications and Presentations

Kaiser, J. W., Heil, A., Andreae, M. O., Benedetti, A., Chubarova, N., Jones, L., Morcrette, J.-J., Razinger, M., Schultz, M. G., Suttie, M., and van der Werf, G. R. (2012). Biomass burning emissions estimated with a global fire assimilation system based on observed fire radiative power. BG, 9:527-554. [PDF]
Xu et al. (2010) New GOES imager algorithms for cloud and active fire detection and fire radiative power assessment across North, South and Central America. RSE Vol. 114 [PDF]
Heil et al. (2010) Assessment of the Real-Time Fire Emissions (GFASv0) by MACC, ECMWF Tech. Memo No. 628 [PDF]

More publications and presentations are available on our dedicated Publications and Presentations web page.