Predicting Fire Emissions: Area Burned

At first glance, amount of area burned seems relatively easy to calculate. However, individual estimates of fire size tend to be systematically exaggerated, and fires are frequently double-counted in inventories. For example, geographic features, non-uniform fuelbeds, or a change in the weather will often cause a fire to create a mosaic of burned, partially burned, and unburned areas, although the entire landscape within the fire perimeter is often reported as burned. In addition, large-scale (such as continental) inventories of area burned are often derived from remote sensing data that have resolutions from 250 m to 1 km (SAI 2002), limiting their precision. Remote sensing accuracy is currently inadequate in landscapes that change slope and fuel characteristics over a few tens of meters.