GFED team
Building GFED started around the year 2000 when James Randerson (then Caltech, now UCI) and Jim Collatz (NASA) were funded to account for fires in the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford-Approach (CASA) biogeochemical model. There were no global burned area datasets and MODIS was just launched. Louis Giglio (then NASA, now UMD) merged satellite data on active fires from various sensors with regional burned area estimates and Guido van der Werf (then NASA, now WUR) used these to estimate emissions using fuel consumption from the satellite-driven Carnegie-Ames-Stanford_approach (CASA) biogeochemical model. With help from Prasad Kasibhatla and Avelino Arellano (Duke) they also used atmospheric CO measurements to constrain these estimates and showed the relevance of fires for atmospheric composition and chemistry.
Since then, Douglas Morton (NASA), Yang Chen (UCI), Joanne Hall (UMD), Niels Andela (BeZeroCarbon), Dave van Wees (BeZeroCarbon), Roland Vernooij (WUR) and many others have made the continuous improvement of GFED possible.
Several developments have enabled more reliable estimes:
- MODIS burned area estimates have increased with consecutive collections and are nowadays truly global
- Higher resolution burned area products enable better accounting for omission (small fires) and commission errors in the MODIS data. This is done using active fire data and is the main reason why GFED5 data is still on a 0.25 degree grid; higher spatial resolutions jeopardize the statistical robustness
- Fuel load modeling has benefitted greatly from new field campaigns (e.g., NASA ABoVe but also numerous smaller ones) enabling better constrained conversion of burned area to emissions
- The number of emission factor measurements has increased substantially, especially in temperate regions and in the savanna biome. In savannas we can now better account for spatial and temporal variability in the partitioning of emitted carbon into trace gases and aerosols
Contact information
Please find below email addresses for the person responsible for different layers and datasets. Please first check our list of frequently asked questions before emailing.
- For GFED5 burned area please contact Yang Chen or James Randerson
- For the MODIS 500m burned area data (not a GFED product) please contact Louis Giglio
- For emissions please contact Guido van der Werf
- For historic emissions please contact Margreet van Marle
- For the Fire Atlas please contact Niels Andela
- For 500m emissions please contact Dave van Wees
Funding
Much of the fire science that benefitted GFED has been funded under grants to Randerson, Giglio, Morton, and Van der Werf from NASA and ESA, the European Research Council (ERC) the Dutch Research Council (NWO), and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Maintaining and further developing GFED is not directly funded.
