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This section refers to the information on burnt areas provided in the "Analysis Tools" of the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS).
Burnt area information in the "Analyis Tools" is derived from the MODIS burned area product (MCD64A1) (more details may be accessed at https://modis-land.gsfc.nasa.gov/burn.html). This information is based on MODIS Collection 6, which combines imagery from Terra and Aqua, along with thermal anomalies. Such data provide burnt date estimates per pixel at the global scale. The MODIS dataset is not near real time, as mapped fire events require more than one month be available (see temporal granularity of the source product https://lpdaac.usgs.gov/dataset_discovery/modis/modis_products_table/mcd64a1_v006). Initial and final dates of the fires are subject to an uncertainty of few days.
It is important to note that GWIS uses MCD64A1 as a source to create a fire-event based database. The post-processing aggregates in time and space the burnt pixels identifying individual fires, extracting the fire evolution and computing a final area. Then, each fire event is tagged with an unique numerical identifier and the initial and final fire date of the event. The final perimeter of the fire event retains the daily evolution of the fire and all the details of the burnt areas included in it for the entire duration of the fire (Artes-Vivancos et al., 2018 (in preparation)).
Country, region and global statistics in the "Analysis Tools" are based on these data. Therefore, statistics may differ from other data derived directly from the MCF64A1 product. Currently, GWIS provides statistics from 2001 to 2017.