8-day global active fire summary at 1km (Copernicus)
What it measures. Combines a week's worth of fire detections into a single 1-kilometre map showing where fires were spotted over each eight-day period.
How it's made. Built from the daily Aqua MODIS fire detections by NASA, taking the strongest fire signal for each pixel across the 8-day window.
How & where you'd use it. A condensed view of where fires occurred, helpful for tracking fire seasons and large burn patterns rather than minute-by-minute response.
What's measured
Coverage & cadence
- Time span2002-07-04 → ongoing
- Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
What you can do with it
- Map vegetation, forests and biomass
- Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
- Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description
The MODIS Aqua MYD14A2 Version 6.1 product provides an 8-day composite of thermal anomalies and active fire detections at 1 km spatial resolution as a Level-3 dataset. The gridded product represents the maximum value of individual fire pixel classes detected during the 8-day observation period. The dataset includes science data layers such as a fire mask identifying fire detections and pixel quality indicators that describe the reliability of the observations.
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=["modis-aqua-myd14a2"], # 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