EP1 · Wildfires
What the satellites see burn each month, worldwide, since 2002: the planet's fire rhythm, the countries that dominate it, and where the anomalies live.
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This is not a map of fires. It is a satellite measure of how much land burned, month by month, for every country on Earth. NASA's MODIS instruments detect the charred ground a fire leaves behind and add up the area.
Most of the world's burned area is African and Australian savanna and grassland that burns routinely every dry season, by design or by habit. It barely features in the loss record. Raw hectares are a poor guide to harm.
That is why a season is judged against its own place. A severe season is one that burns far above what that country normally sees, measured in standard deviations from its two-decade baseline. It is the anomaly, not the acreage, that signals something has gone wrong.
Fire turns into an insurance event when it reaches what people have built, or burns forests that rarely burn. The damage is concentrated at the wildland-urban interface, the fringe where towns meet unmanaged vegetation.
Every severe fire season flagged in the record: country, year, hectares burned and how far above that country's own baseline it ran.
The season that never stopped: 13.3 million hectares burned, more than four standard deviations above baseline and triple the previous satellite-era record, with smoke that turned New York orange.