United States Active Fires 2012

NIFC statistics show that more than 9.1 million acres had burned as of November 30, 2012—the third highest total in a record that dates back to 1960. Also notable: despite the high number of acres burned in 2012, the total number of fires—55,505—was low, the least on the NIFC record. Average fire size in 2012 was the highest on the record.

The visualizations depict fires that burned between January 1 and October 31, 2012, as detected by the MODIS instruments. The fires are displayed over MODIS' vegetation and snow cover data. Yellow and orange indicates fires that were more intense and had a larger area of active burning. Most of these intense fires occurred in the western United States, where lightning and human activity often sparks blazes that firefighters cannot contain. Many of the lower intensity fires shown in red were prescribed fires, lit for either agricultural or ecosystem management purposes.

The Terra and Aqua Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) can routinely detect both flaming and smoldering fires that are aproximately 1000 square meters in size. Under pristine and extremely rare observing conditions even smaller flaming fires that are aproximately 50 square meters can be detected. Each active fire location represents the center of a 1 km pixel that is flagged by the algorithm as containing a fire within the pixel. For more information on the fire data, see the MODIS Collection 5 Active Fire Product User's Guide. For more information on the algorithm, see Giglio, L., J. Descloitres, C. O. Justice, and Y. J. Kaufman. 2003. An enhanced contextual fire detection algorithm for MODIS. Remote Sensing of Environment, 87:273-282