Can I estimate burned area using the active fire/hotspot data?
It is not recommended to use hotspot/active fire locations to estimate burned area due to spatial and temporal sampling issues. Determining this to an acceptable degree of accuracy is generally not possible due to nontrivial spatial and temporal sampling issues. For some applications, however, acceptable accuracy can be achieved, although the effective area burned per fire pixel is not simply a constant, but rather varies with respect to several different vegetation and fire-related variables. See Giglio et al. (2006) for more information. FIRMS will provide burned area data via Web Fire Mapper in the near future. Please refer to the following link for more information on the MODIS Burned Area Product and information on how to access the HDF files.
