Burned Area - Fire Frequency

The Terra and Aqua combined MCD64A1 Version 6 Burned Area data product is a monthly, global gridded 500m product containing per-pixel burned-area and quality information. The MCD64A1 burned-area mapping approach employs 500m MODIS Surface Reflectance imagery coupled with 1km MODIS active fire observations. The algorithm uses a burn sensitive vegetation index (VI) to create dynamic thresholds that are applied to the composite data. The VI is derived from MODIS shortwave infrared atmospherically corrected surface reflectance bands 5 and 7 with a measure of temporal texture. The algorithm identifies the date of burn for the 500m grid cells within each individual MODIS tile. The date is encoded in a single data layer as the ordinal day of the calendar year on which the burn occurred, with values assigned to unburned land pixels and additional special values reserved for missing data and water grid cells.