Deforestation pushes 2020 fire activity above average across the Southern Amazon

August 19, 2020

With support from NASA, scientists have developed a new approach to cluster individual fire detections into fire events and classify each fire event across the southern Amazon and surrounding biomes. Of the three fire types occurring in forested landscapes, deforestation fires showed the largest contribution to VIIRS 375 m satellite fire detections, followed by small clearing and agricultural fires, and understory forest fires. Updated daily, the Amazon Dashboard provides quick access to new information on the location, fire type, start date, spread rate, and duration of individual fire events across the Amazon. For more information, or to explore and download the near-real time data, please see our Amazon dashboard.  

Time series of active fire detections from the VIIRS instruments onboard the NOAA-20 and Suomi-NPP satellites, stratified by fire type, for the southern Amazon biome and Southern Hemisphere South America (0° – 25°S). Grassland and savanna fires are excluded from this figure. The black line (right y-axis) depicts average active fire detections from the Suomi-NPP VIIRS instrument during 2012-2019 for all grid cells with >50% tree cover.