Aursee · method

Land cover and roads under a fire

What kind of ground a fire is burning on, and how many roads are around it: sources and resolution.

Land cover

Land cover is read from ESA WorldCover 2021 (version 200), a global map at 10 m resolution. For each fire we take the most common class in a box about 500 m wide around its position: tree cover, shrubland, grassland, cropland, built up, bare or sparse, snow and ice, water, herbaceous wetland, mangrove, or moss and lichen.

The map is from 2021. Ground cleared or planted since then shows its 2021 class.

Roads

Road density comes from GRIP4, the Global Roads Inventory Project, on a grid of 5 arc-minutes, about 9 km at the equator. It gives metres of road per square kilometre around a fire, which describes the area, not the exact spot.

More on the method

• What a satellite fire detection isHow VIIRS finds active fires from orbit, what a 375 m detection means, and when a fire is not seen.
• Fires in the dark: how satellites find them at nightWhy a fire is easier to see from orbit at night, how VIIRS picks a flame of a few dozen square metres out of a 375 m pixel, and what “burning in darkness” means on the map.
• Fire radiative power (MW)What fire radiative power measures, how Aursee adds it up, and how to compare two fires.
• How detections become firesThe rule Aursee uses to turn individual satellite pixels into fires you can open, name and follow.
• The burn archive, 2012 to todayHow Aursee remembers where fire has been detected since 2012, and what the history figures on each page mean.
• Lightning near a fireHow Aursee checks for lightning before a fire was first seen, and where that check is possible.
• Weather at a fireWhere the wind, humidity and temperature on a fire page come from, and at what time and resolution.
• Data sources and licencesEvery dataset Aursee uses, who publishes it, and the licence it is used under.