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Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable products for the conterminous United States (1984 - 2015)

Published by U.S. Geological Survey | Department of the Interior | Metadata Last Checked: January 27, 2026 | Last Modified: 2020-08-20T00:00:00Z
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has developed and implemented an algorithm that identifies burned areas in temporally-dense time series of Landsat image stacks to produce the Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV) products. The algorithm makes use of predictors derived from individual Landsat scenes, lagged reference conditions, and change metrics between the scene and reference conditions. Outputs of the BAECV algorithm consist of pixel-level burn probabilities for each Landsat scene, and annual burn probability, burn classification, and burn date composites. These products were generated for the conterminous United States for 1984 through 2015. These data are also available for download at https://gsc.cr.usgs.gov/outgoing/baecv/BAECV_CONUS_v1.1_2017/ Additional details about the algorithm used to generate these products are 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, 504522. doi:10.1016/j.rse.2017.06.027 First release: 2017 Revised: September 2017 (ver.1.1)

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