News

The essential information needed for this purpose is the location and extension of a fire together with information on the type of vegetation burnt.

Results
The following conclusions were drawn by J.Hoelzemann from MPI-Hamburg when using the products: "GLOBSCAR is a big improvement for determining area burnt for global fire emission modelling. Nevertheless, there are further improvements to be made and future needs from the part of the atmospheric chemistry modelling community".

In view of the atmospheric chemistry community needs, the following information should be associated to the products for a better use: - The type of vegetation burnt. A further evaluation of the vegetation source with regard to the fire characteristics is very important for the determination of fire emissions. - Cloud coverage, in order to allow for cloud correction of the estimated emissions

The following points are seen as intrinsic limitations of the product: - Under storey peat fires cannot be detected by satellites. They deliver an important contribution to trace gas emissions e.g. in Russia, and Indonesia. - Areas permanently cloudy at the time of re-visit of the satellite (e.g some equatorial forests) cannot be observed using an optical instrument such as ATSR. - Data descoping which occurs in several areas of the globe, in particular over Siberia causes underdetection in those areas.

There is a strong interest from the atmospheric chemistry modelling community in the future GLOBCARBON products, in particular due to the high inter-annual variability of fire emissions.