Unique Global Near Real Time Burnt Area Dataset

The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service delivers global maps identifying areas affected by fire at a spatial resolution of 300 metres. The version 4.0 of daily burnt areas (BA) products, is available within 24 hours after satellite acquisition, has been recently released. In the context of its land monitoring activities, HYGEOS has coordinated the work between Complutig, the Spanish company that has set-up the Burnt Areas retrieval methodology, and VITO that operates the processing chain.

The daily BA v4.0 provides the date of burnt but also the pixel burnt fraction, an information not provided by other existing burnt areas products. As such, CLMS BA v4.0 offer unique information to monitor the extent of burn scars and track the impact of wildfire on ecosystems. As an example, the animation at right monitors the dynamic of large wildfires that occurred during 2025 summer in northwestern Spain.

Daily fractional burned area over northwestern Spain from 8^th to 22^nd August 2025. 12 of August is missing because the image is fully covered by clouds. Courtesy of Complutig. 

The daily dataset covers the period from January 2025 onwards. It is complemented by the monthly Burnt Areas version 4.0 product covering the period from July 2018 to today. Daily and Monthly products have passed an exhaustive validation procedure performed according to the international standard and using independent reference dataset. As we can see on the image below, the monthly BA v4.0 (CLMBA40ntc) has the highest accuracy compared to any other global product; the accuracy of the daily BA v4.0 (CLMBA40nrt) is similar to the best equivalent non-time-critical product, which is available several years after the current date.

Estimated accuracy Dice Coefficient (DC), Commission error ratio (Ce), Omission error ratio (Oe) and relative bias (relB), expressed as %, at the globe for the year 2020. Error bars express 95% confidence intervals. MCD64 refers to Non-Time-Critical MODIS-MCD64 Collection 6 product. FIRECCIS311 refers to Non-Time-Critical product derived from 300m Sentinel-3 SLSTR in the ESA Climate Change Initiative Fire Disturbance project. Figure extracted from the validation report.

The daily and monthly Burnt Areas products come with a set of technical documents: a Product User Manual, an Algorithm Theoretical Basis Document and a Validation Report.  Methodology, datasets and validation results are also presented in Padilla and al., 2025.

Many options are offered to download the products, including customized order. They are also viewable through the browser of the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem.