News & Events

Jan. 8, 2020

Satellite Estimations of the Amazonian 2019 Fire Crisis

Scientific letter published on Amazonian 2019 fire crisis

Remote Sensing has recently published a scientific letter comparing the fire occurrence estimations informed by the press (based on active fire information) and the burned area detected by the FireCCI51 algorithm during the Amazonian 2019 fire crisis.

This short paper compares fire occurrence estimations derived from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data of active fires (the ones that were used by the international press) and from burned area products (FireCCI51) for the first 10 months of 2019 in SA. Results show a significant increase in fire activity in 2019 compared to the full-time series (2001–2018) in Bolivia, Paraguay and Venezuela, while Brazil shows a much higher BA than in 2018, but with values around the average burned area of the whole time series.