DOI: 10.5066/p9f26ly6
title: The Landsat Collection 2 Burned Area Products for the conterminous United States (ver. 2.0, April 2024)

description: The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has developed and implemented an algorithm that identifies burned areas in temporally dense time series of Landsat Analysis Ready Data (ARD) scenes to produce the Landsat Burned Area Products. The algorithm uses predictors derived from individual ARD Landsat scenes, lagged reference conditions, and change metrics between the scene and reference conditions. Scene-level products include pixel-level burn probability (BP) and burn classification (BC) images corresponding to each Landsat image in the ARD time series. Annual composite products are also available by summarizing the scene-level products. Prior to generating annual composites, individual scenes that had greater than 0.010 burned proportion were visually assessed as part of a quality assurance check. Scenes with obvious commission errors were removed. The annual products include the maximum burn probability (BP), burn classification count (BC) or the number of scenes a pixel was classified as burned, filtered burn classification (BF) with burned areas persistent from the previous year removed, and the burn date (BD) or the Julian date of the first Landsat scene a burned areas was observed in. Vectorized versions of the BF raster are also provided as shapefiles (BF_labeled) with attributes including summary statistics of BC, BD, BP, as well as the majority level 3 ecoregion (Omernik and Griffith, 2014) and count of pixels by each National Land Cover Database Category (Vogelmann et al., 2001; Yang et al., 2018) for each burned area polygon. These products were generated for the conterminous United States for 1984 through 2021 individually for each collection 1 Landsat TM (5), Landsat ETM+ (7), OLI/TIRS (8 and 9), and for all sensors combined. The products for each sensor combination and year are contained in a compressed tar file. Starting in 2022, processing switched to the collection 2 Landsat ARD data. This data release provides annual burned area composited for 2022 to 2024 based on the collection 2 Landsat ARD data for the conterminous United States for Landsat ETM+ (7), OLI/TIRS (8 and 9), and for all sensors combined. 

Collection 1 burned area products for 1984 - 2021 are available through the USGS Science Base Catalog (https://doi.org/10.5066/P9QKHKTQ) and also at https://gec.cr.usgs.gov/outgoing/baecv/LBA/LBA_CU_C01_V01/

Additional details about the algorithm used to generate these products are described in Hawbaker, T.J., Vanderhoof, M.K., Schmidt, G.L., Beal, Y, Takacs, J.D., Falgout, J.T., Picotte, J.J., and Dwyer, J.L. 2020. The Landsat Burned Area algorithm and products for the conterminous United States. Remote Sensing of Environment, Vol. 244, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2020.111801

An older version of these data are available, based on the approach described in Hawbaker, T.J., Vanderhoof, M.K., Beal, Y.G., Takacs, J.D., Schmidt, G.L., Falgout, J.T., Williams, B., Brunner, N.M., Caldwell, M.K., Picotte, J.J., Howard, S.M., Stitt, S., and Dwyer, J.L., 2017. Mapping burned areas using dense time-series of Landsat data. Remote Sensing of Environment 198, 504–522. doi:10.1016/j.rse.2017.06.027 First release: 2017

1984 – 2015 Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable data: Hawbaker, T.J., Vanderhoof, M.K., Beal, Y.G., Takacs, J.D., Schmidt, G.L., Falgout, J.T., Williams, Brad, Brunner, N.M., Caldwell, M.K., Picotte, J.J., Howard, S.M., Stitt, Susan, and Dwyer, J.L., 2017, Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable products for the conterminous United States (1984 - 2015) (ver. 1.1, September 2017): U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/F73B5X76.