International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B8, 2012
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia
GLOBAL BURNED AREA MAPPING FROM EUROPEAN SATELLITES: THE ESA
FIRE CCI PROJECT
E. Chuvieco®, Christopher Sandow?, K. P. Guenther', F. González-Alonso!, J.M. Pereira‘, O. Perez“, A.V. Bradley®, M. Schultz”, F.
Mouillot' and P. Ciais!
*Departamento de Geografía, Universidad de Alcalá. Colegios, 2. 28801 Alcalá de Henares, Spain.
emilio.chuvieco@uah.es
PGAF AG, Arnulfstr. 197, 80634 Munich, Germany. christopher.sandow@gaf.de
German Aerospace Center (DLR), German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD), 82234 Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany.
Kurt.Guenther@dlr.de
‘Centro de Investigacion Forestal (CIFOR). INIA. Crta. Km7 28040. Madrid. Spain. alonso@inia.es
“Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Tapada da Ajuda, 1349-017 Lisboa, Portugal.
f{GMV AEROSPACE AND DEFENCE, S.A., Isaac Newton, 11, E-28760 Madrid (Spain). operez@gmv.com
Department of Geography, University of Leicester, University Road LE1 7RH. UK. avb4@leicester.ac.uk
"Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH, 52425 Juelich, Germany. m.schultz@fz-juelich.de
. TRD,1919 Route de Mend, 34293 Montpellier Cedex 5, France. mouillot@cefe.cnrs.fr
JIPSL — LSCE,CEA CNRS UVSQ, 91191 Gif sur Yvette France. philippe.ciais@lsce.ipsi.fr
KEY WORDS: Burned Area, Climate Change, MERIS, ATSR, VEGETATION, European Space Agency
ABSTRACT:
The European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) is part of the European contribution to the Global Climate
Observing System (GCOS) program. Fire disturbance is one of the Essential Climate Variables (ECV) included in the ESA CCI
program. It focus on mapping burned area (BA) using European sensors (ATSR, VEGETATION and MERIS data), and in
comparing the performance of the results with other existing datasets. The project aims at developing and validating algorithms to
produce consistent, stable, error-characterized global BA information. The project includes as well developing algorithms to generate
georeferenced and calibrated reflectances of (A)ATSR, VEGETATION and MERIS data, identifying potential sources of confusion
with burned areas (clouds, smoke, cloud shadows, water, snow, topographic shadows). The final product will be a merging of BA
information derived from three different sensors .
modelling communities.
1. INTRODUCTION
The European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative
(CCI) is part of the European contribution to the Global Climate
Observing System (GCOS) program. In particular, the objective
of this initiative is producing consistent and accurate time series
of Essential Climate Variables (ECV), which can be used by
climate, atmospheric and ecosystem scientists for their
modeling efforts (Plummer, 2009). The CCI stresses the
importance of improving scientific impact of data acquired by
ESA sensors, while maintain close links with key science
bodies and other agencies currently generating ECV data. The
first call of the CCI program includes ten ECVs covering
atmospheric products (ozone, greenhouse gasses, aerosols,
clouds), oceanic variables (ocean colour, sea ice, height and
temperature), and terrestrial (fire, glaciers, and land cover).
Biomass burning is widely recognized as one of the critical
factors affecting vegetation succession and carbon budgets
worldwide (Chuvieco, 2008; Thonicke et al., 2010). At regional
and local scale, fires have also important socio-economic
implications, both affecting lives and structures (Chuvieco et
al., 2010).
At a global scale, the effects of fire on the atmospheric
chemistry are one of the most complex factors to account for in
the current emission models, although recent studies estimate
that biomass burning is responsible for half (3-4 Pg C) of the
CO2 released by fossil fuels consumption (Bowman et al.,
2009; van der Werf et al., 2010). The available estimations are
based on bottom-up approaches, which try to account for the
different factors of fire-related emissions. They require accurate
mapping of pre-fire biomass, of burned areas and of the amount
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The outputs will be adapted to the needs of the atmospheric and vegetation
of biomass that has been actually consumed by the fire (Seiler
and Crutzen, 1980). The generation of these variables still
presents high uncertainty, and therefore the estimations have a
wide range of variability (van der Werf et al., 2010). The actual
area affected by fires worldwide is not yet accurately known.
The most recent studies based on multitemporal series of
MODIS data estimate that an average area of 3.5 million km2 is
burned every year (Giglio et al., 2010; Tansey et al, 2008),
mostly in the Tropical savannas, temperate grasslands and
boreal forests. Other impacts of fire on the global climate are
still poorly understood, such as the direct and indirect role of
aerosols, their impact on land use change and surface albedo,
the relation with tropospheric ozone and the deposition of black
carbon on soils (Bowman et al., 2009).
The fire cci project aims to improve mapping of burned areas
(BA) and the use of BA information in global vegetation and
atmospheric models. The BA maps will be generated from
European sensors: (A)ATSR, VEGETATION and MERIS data,
trying to meet the GCOS ECV requirements (Global Climate
Observing System (GCOS), 2009), which require consistent,
stable, error-characterized global satellite data products from
multi-sensor data archives. A synthetic estimation based on the
three sensors will be produced for the temporal series of 1995 to
2009 for several study sites, as well as for five years of global
coverage. The project will dedicate considerable effort to
validate the products and interact with modellers. From a
conceptual point of view, the project tries to answer the
following scientific questions: What is the actual magnitude of
fire impacts? How much area is burned annually worldwide?,
What are the recent trends in fire activity? These questions are
the basis for other aspects of global fire science, such as the
