Monthly global map of wildfire burn scars (Copernicus, 2019-2025)
What it measures. A month-by-month record of land scorched by fire across the globe, marking where plant cover was burned away and the ground left darkened by ash. Mapped at about 300-metre detail.
How it's made. Built by ESA Copernicus from the Sentinel-3 satellites' OLCI and SLSTR instruments, released with roughly a two-month delay for added quality.
How & where you'd use it. Good for tracking fire seasons, comparing year-to-year fire activity, and informing land and climate studies. This version spans 2019 to 2025.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2019-01-01 → 2025-08-01
- Spatial extent-179.9999999, -59.9985119, 179.9985119, 80.0014881
- FormatsCOG, NetCDF
What you can do with it
- Map vegetation, forests and biomass
- Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
- Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description
Maps burn scars, surfaces which have been sufficiently affected by fire to display significant changes in the vegetation cover (destruction of dry material, reduction or loss of green material) and in the ground surface (temporarily darker because of ash). Monthly datasets are available at global scale, in the spatial resolution of 300 m, and with a time lag of two months. They cover the period from 2019 to 2025.
Get the data
# ESA Copernicus Data Space — open STAC API (free account)
from pystac_client import Client
cat = Client.open("https://stac.dataspace.copernicus.eu/v1")
search = cat.search(
collections=["clms_ba_global_300m_monthly_v3"], # add _cog or _nc for a format variant
bbox=(-10, 35, 30, 60), # your area (W,S,E,N)
datetime="2024-01-01/2024-12-31",
)
items = list(search.items()) # then read assets with rioxarray / xarrayBrowsing the Copernicus STAC is open; downloading bytes needs a free Copernicus Data Space account.
Official links
- Open data source Copernicus STAC