Specific programme: European Space Agency (ESA) – Climate Change Initiative
UPV/EHU Partner Status:  Member of Earth Observation Science Team
UPV/EHU PI: Aitor Bastarrika
Project start: 01/01/2016
Project end:   31/12/2018

Brief description:  Current global burned area products already exist but the Fire_cci project aims to improve consistency using better algorithms for both pre-processing and burned area detection while incorporating error characterisation in their product. The project focuses on the following issues relating to Fire Disturbance:
• Analysis and specification of scientific requirements relating to climate
• Development and improvement of pre-processing and burned area algorithms.
• Inter-comparison and selection of burned area algorithms
• System prototyping and production of burned area datasets
• Product validation and product assessment
More specifically, the project team aims to:
• Develop and validate algorithms to meet as far as possible GCOS Essential Climate Variable (ECV) requirements for (consistent, stable, error-characterized) global satellite data products from multi-sensor data archives
• Produce and validate, within a research and development context, the most complete and consistent possible time series of multi-sensor global satellite data products for climate research and modelling
• Optimize the impact of ESA Earth Observation (EO) missions data on climate data records
• Strengthen inter-disciplinary cooperation between international earth observation, climate research and modelling communities, in pursuit of scientific excellence.
The project focuses on the key variable: burned area. It will incorporate active fire observations as a supplemental variable to improve detection of burned area across varying biomes.