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Fire Climate Change Initiative

Current global burned area products already exist but the Fire_cci project aims to improve consistency using better algorithms for both pre-processing and burned area detection while incorporating error characterization in their product.

The project team lead by University of Alcala (Spain) focuses on the following issues relating to Fire Disturbance:

  • Analysis and specification of scientific requirements relating to climate.
  • Development and improvement of pre-processing and burned area algorithms.
  • Inter-comparison and selection of burned area algorithms.
  • System prototyping and production of burned area datasets.
  • Product validation and product assessment.

More specifically, the project team aims to:

  • Develop and validate algorithms to meet as far as possible GCOS Essential Climate Variable (ECV) requirements for (consistent, stable, error-characterized) global satellite data products from multi-sensor data archives.
  • Produce and validate, within a research and development context, the most complete and consistent possible time series of multi-sensor global satellite data products for climate research and modelling.
  • Optimize the impact of ESA Earth Observation (EO) missions data on climate data records.
  • Strengthen inter-disciplinary cooperation between international earth observation, climate research and modelling communities, in pursuit of scientific excellence.

The project focuses on the key variable «burned area». It will incorporate active fire observations as a supplemental variable to improve detection of burned area across varying biomes.

Duration:  2022 – 2024 (24 months)

Funding source (Code): European Space Agency (ESA)

Participant entities: Universidad de Alcala, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, National Research Council of Italy, Brockman Consult, Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie, Centre national de la recherche scientifique

Official webpage: https://www.esa-fire-cci.org/

Laboratory/internal web: http://medal.ctb.upm.es/projects/ESA-FIRE/

Responsible:  Consuelo Gonzalo Martin