FIRMS: Can I estimate burned area from active fire data?

[Earthdata - wxedward]

Can I estimate burned area from active fire data?

It is not recommended to use active fire locations to estimate burned area as determining burned area to an acceptable degree of accuracy is not possible due to nontrivial spatial and temporal sampling issues. For some applications, however, acceptable accuracy can be achieved, although the effective area burned per fire pixel is not simply a constant, but rather varies with respect to several different vegetation and fire-related variables. See Giglio et al. (2006) for more information. See "Where can I get the MODIS burned area product?"

Most recently, Harmonized Landsat Sentinel (HLS) false color composite imagery was included in FIRMS and these data can be helpful in estimating burned area (see FIRMS Blog post on adding HLS).