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Landsat Burned Area Products Data Release - Landsat 5 TM products

Metadata Updated: October 30, 2025

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 makes use of 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 > 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 2019 individually for Landsat TM (5), Landsat ETM+ (7), OLI/TIRS (8), and for all sensors combined. The products for each sensor combination and year are contained in a compressed tar file 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

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date September 13, 2025
Metadata Updated Date October 30, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI USGS DCAT-US

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date September 13, 2025
Metadata Updated Date October 30, 2025
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
Identifier http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/usgs-5ecd73b782ce476925f54c9d
Data Last Modified 2022-03-17T00:00:00Z
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://ddi.doi.gov/usgs-data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 18c52d4e-28c6-4d4f-98b1-7a6ed14f8f29
Harvest Source Id 2b80d118-ab3a-48ba-bd93-996bbacefac2
Harvest Source Title DOI USGS DCAT-US
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -128.596464, 21.805094, -63.792494, 47.80675
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 8ba21e769f80461fb0041a49c6c225ad0b4036bfbf22fddc4f5208ec16a43201
Source Schema Version 1.1
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