This article was written as part of the 20th anniversary celebration of this website.Earth has rightly been called a “water planet” because of the large percentage of the surface covered by oceans. But for the 30 percent that is land, the better name may be “fire planet.” “Something is always burning somewhere,” said Niels Andela, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Andela and colleagues recently compiled a global fire atlas—an easily accessible database chronicling the dynamics of 13.3 million fires observed by NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments between 2003 and 2016. For each fire, the atlas contains detailed information about when each fire started and ended, in what direction it spread, how quickly it moved, and more.
“With the breadth and granularity of data in the Global Fire Atlas, we can start addressing nuanced questions like how fires respond to winds or to year-to-year variability in rainfall,” said Douglas Morton, chief of the Biospheric Sciences Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We know factors like these influence fire behavior, and the atlas is helping give us a clearer view of these impacts.”
Fires happen in almost all of Earth’s biomes. In tropical rainforests in South America and equatorial Asia, people take advantage of dry spells to burn trees to clear land for farms and pasture. In coniferous forests in Russia, Canada, Scandinavia, and Alaska, fire is a routine sign that summer heat and lightning have arrived. Increasingly, fires are even spreading through the Arctic, where there is little to burn other than grasses, sedges, and a few shrubs. The photograph below shows an intense crown fire raging through stand of black spruce in a boreal forest in Alaska on June 19, 2019.
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