Fire-burned area 2019

Fire affects an estimated four million square kilometres of Earth’s land each year and is responsible for releasing aerosols and greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Understanding the influence that this has on atmospheric chemistry and representing these emissions in future climate predictions is, however, complex and remains poorly understood. To improve the situation, a team of scientists working as part of ESA’s Climate Change Initiative is using satellite observations, such as from Copernicus Sentinel-3, to gain a global view of land burned by fire. The map shows FireCCI51 product of global burned area so far based on MODIS and that will be later extended thanks to the use of Copernicus Sentinel-3 data.

Read full story: New dataset to analyse global fire trends