A Spatiotemporal Evaluation Framework for MODIS-Derived Fire Events

Abstract. The MODIS burned area product is widely used to extract ignition locations and delineate individual fires for wildfire probabilistic loss modeling. However, limited studies have systematically evaluated the accuracy of these derived fire events through detailed spatial and temporal comparisons with reference datasets. This study addresses this gap by developing a robust framework to assess the accuracy of MODIS-derived individual fires across the United States. In this study, the MODIS Collection 6 MCD64 burned area product was used to extract ignition locations and individual fire events using the Fire Events Delineation (FIRED) algorithm. A comprehensive evaluation framework was then implemented to assess the delineated fire events against the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) reference dataset, accounting for both spatial overlap and temporal consistency. The results show that the proposed approach achieved an average Intersection over Union (IoU) score of 0.54, an F-score of 0.701, an overall accuracy of 0.77, precision of 0.90, and recall of 0.57. These metrics represent averages across the period 2001–2020. Collectively, the results highlight the strengths and limitations of the event detection system and provide a quantitative assessment of its performance. This comprehensive evaluation offers valuable insights into the reliability of MODIS-derived individual fire events and improves understanding of their suitability for wildfire probabilistic loss modeling and related applications.