Landsat Burned Area

Landsat Burned AreaReturn to Landsat Science Products OverviewLeft: Landsat Surface Reflectance image (Landsat 7 bands 5,4,3) and Right: Derived Burned Area product for an area within Landsat CONUS ARD tile h006v010 acquired on July 7, 2003. Accurate and complete data on fire locations and burned areas (e.g. fire occurrence) are needed to quantify trends and patterns of fire occurrence, characterize drivers of fire occurrence, projections of future fire pattern behavior, and help with assessments of fire impacts on both natural and social systems.The Landsat Burned Area product is designed to identify burned areas across all ecosystems (e.g. forests, shrublands, and grasslands) for Landsat 4-8 data.The Landsat Burned Area product contains two acquisition-based raster data products that represent burn classification and burn probability. Landsat Burned Area is generated from U.S. Landsat Analysis Ready Data (ARD) Surface Reflectance and Top of Atmosphere Brightness Temperature data.The Landsat Burned Area product is processed to 30-meter spatial resolution in Albers Equal Area (AEA) projection using the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84) datum and gridded to a common tiling scheme.Product AvailabilityThe Landsat Burned Area product is available for the conterminous U.S for the following date ranges:Landsat 8 OLI: April 2013 to presentLandsat 7 ETM+: July 1999 to December 2017Landsat 5 TM: March 1984 to May 2012Landsat 4 TM: March 1984 to December 1993Package ContentThe Burned Area product includes two acquisition-based raster data products that represent burn classification and burn probability.  Additional product specifications can be found in the Landsat Burned Area Product Guide. The Burned Area package includes a metadata file in Extensible Markup Language (.xml) format.The list below describes the products and filenames that are delivered with the Landsat Burned Area package. Burn Probability (BP): Provides the maximum per-pixel BP; generated by comparing the current individual acquisition against composites created from seasonal average and the previous year of acquisition.Delivered file name: _BP.tifApproximate file size: 8.3 MBBurned Classification (BC): Indicates if an area was burned by applying a threshold to the BP product.Delivered file name: _BC.tifApproximate file size: 200 KBCaveats and ConstraintsOnly images with a RMSE less than 10 m and cloud cover less than 80 percent are processed to a Burned Area product.A Quality Assessment process is applied to the Burned Area products prior to public release, which includes visually assessing each scene-level Burned Area product for excessive commission errors caused by factors such as incorrect cloud masks or poor georeferencing. Therefore, while the majority of Landsat scenes were used to generate Burned Area products, certain scenes may not be able to be processed to produce a scientifically viable Burned Area product.Due to a bug in the Collection 1 Burned Area code, pixels in the top row (northern edge) and left column (western edge) of the Landsat ARD tile may be incorrectly classified as not-burned in the BC layer, while the BP layer indicates a burn probability greater than 71% and the burn region is larger than the threshold seed size. Users can still refer to the BP layer to obtain the correct burn probability. This issue will be fixed in the Collection 2 Burned Area product.Occasionally some burned areas are incorrectly classified as being water in the Burned Area product. This occurs if the input ARD Pixel QA (PIXELQA) band includes pixels that are flagged as “water, terrain, low-confidence cloud”.The product metadata file (.xml) lists the band information for both the burn classification and burn probability.  The units for the pixel size is “m” and should be “meters” to be compliant with the schema.User CommunitiesLandsat Burned Area User CommunitiesCommunityPotential UseCarbon cycling research (e.g., Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Forest Carbon Tracking, USGS Carbon Sequestration)Tracking carbon from living and dead vegetation and coal/humus states into atmospheric statesWildland resource management agencies and groups (including US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, BLM Alaska Fire Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Fish and Wildlife Service)Planning and management of fire occurrence on managed landsMonitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS)Locations of burned areas for additional severity analysisLANDFIREFire hazard evaluation, disturbance characterization, change trackingFire research (e.g., National Interagency Fire Center, Office of Wildland Fire)30 meter product of history and extent of fire locationsAgricultural, grasslands, and prairie research (including GEO Agriculture, US Forest Service, Agricultural Research Service,  some Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER) sites)Grasslands and prairie research, cropland and prairie burning extent, history, and useCommittee on Earth Observations from Space (CEOS) Land  Product Validation Working Group for Burned Area Validation ProtocolsValidation and/or verification of alternative burned area productsClimate researchTracking of greenhouse gas generation, and fire activity as an indicator or symptom of changes in climateGlobal Observation of Forest Cover and Land Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD)Fire management, emissions estimation and smoke trace gas monitoring, the role of fire in the carbon budget, and burned area product validation of other systemsData AccessLandsat Burned Area products are available for download from EarthExplorer. The data are located under the Landsat category, Landsat Collection 1 Level-3 subcategory, and listed as Burned Area.Visit the Landsat Data Access webpage for information about bulk download options.  DocumentationLandsat Burned Area Product GuideLandsat Burned Area Algorithm Description Document (ADD)Landsat Burned Area Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5066/F77W6BDJCitation InformationThere are no restrictions on the use of Landsat Level-3 Science Products. It is not a requirement of data use, but the following citations may be used in publication or presentation materials to acknowledge the USGS as a data source and to credit the original research.Landsat Level 3 Burned Area  Science Product courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.Hawbaker, T.J., Vanderhoof, M.K., Schmidt, G.L., Beal, Y.-J., Picotte, J.J., Takacs, J.D., Falgout, J.T., Dwyer, J.L., 2020. The Landsat Burned Area algorithm and products for the United States. Remote Sensing of the Environment 244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2020.111801Hawbaker, T.J., Vanderhoof, M.K., Beal, Y.-J., Takacs, J.D., Schmidt, G.L., Falgout, J.T., Williams, B., Brunner, N.M., Caldwell, M.K., Picotte, J.J., Howard, S.M., Stitt, S., Dwyer, J.L., 2017a. Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable products for the conterminous United States (1984 -2015). U.S. Geological Survey Data Release. https://doi.org/10.5066/F73B5X76Hawbaker, T.J., Vanderhoof, M.K., Beal, Y.-J., Takacs, J.D., Schmidt, G.L., Falgout, J.T., Williams, B., Fairaux, N.M., Caldwell, M.K., Picotte, J.J., Howard, S.M., Stitt, S., Dwyer, J.L., 2017b. Mapping burned areas using dense time-series of Landsat data. Remote Sensing of Environment 198, 504–522. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2017.06.027 ReferencesHawbaker, T.J., Vanderhoof, M.K., Schmidt, G.L., Beal, Y.-J., Picotte, J.J., Takacs, J.D., Falgout, J.T., Dwyer, J.L., 2020. The Landsat Burned Area algorithm and products for the United States. Remote Sensing of the Environment 244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2020.111801Hawbaker, T.J., Vanderhoof, M.K., Beal, Y.-J., Takacs, J.D., Schmidt, G.L., Falgout, J.T., Williams, B., Brunner, N.M., Caldwell, M.K., Picotte, J.J., Howard, S.M., Stitt, S., Dwyer, J.L., 2017a. Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable products for the conterminous United States (1984 -2015). U.S. Geological Survey Data Release. https://doi.org/10.5066/F73B5X76Hawbaker, T.J., Vanderhoof, M.K., Beal, Y.-J., Takacs, J.D., Schmidt, G.L., Falgout, J.T., Williams, B., Fairaux, N.M., Caldwell, M.K., Picotte, J.J., Howard, S.M., Stitt, S., Dwyer, J.L., 2017b. Mapping burned areas using dense time-series of Landsat data. Remote Sensing of Environment 198, 504–522. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2017.06.027Vanderhoof, K.M., Brunner, N., Beal, G.Y.-J., Hawbaker, J.T., 2017. Evaluation of the U.S. Geological Survey Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable across the Conterminous U.S. Using Commercial High-Resolution Imagery. Remote Sensing 9. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs9070743Vanderhoof, M.K., Fairaux, N., Beal, Y.-J.G., Hawbaker, T.J., 2017a. Validation of the USGS Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV) across the conterminous United States. Remote Sensing of Environment 198, 393–406. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2017.06.025Vanderhoof, M.K., Fairaux, N.M., Beal, Y.-J., Hawbaker, T.J., 2017b. Data Release for the Validation of the USGS Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV) across the conterminous U.S. U.S. Geological Survey Data Release. https://doi.org/10.5066/F7T151VX