USGS EROS Archive - Landsat Collection 2 Level-3 Burned Area (BA) Science Product Active

Back to Products Overview

Sources/Usage: Public Domain. View Media Details

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) offers Landsat Collection 2 (C2) Level- 3 Burned Area (BA) science products for Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), and Landsat 4-5 Thematic Mapper (TM).  

Landsat C2 BA science products are generated from Landsat C2 U.S. Analysis Ready Data (ARD) Surface Reflectance and Top of Atmosphere Brightness Temperature data, processed to 30-meter spatial resolution in Albers Equal Area (AEA) projection using the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84) datum, and gridded to a common tiling scheme.

The Landsat C2 BA science products are available for the conterminous United States for the following date ranges:

• Landsat 8 OLI: April 2013 to present
• Landsat 7 ETM+: July 1999 to present
• Landsat 5 TM: March 1984 to May 2012
• Landsat 4 TM: March 1984 to September 1992

Landsat 9 C2 BA products will become available later in 2022.

The map below displays the C2 ARD tile-based coverage of Landsat C2 BA products. 

Sources/Usage: Public Domain. View Media Details

Most Landsat Collection 2 Level-1 scenes can be processed to generate a BA product. In addition to the caveats listed on the Landsat C2 ARD and C2 Surface Reflectance web pages.

• Only images with a RMSE less than 10 m and cloud cover less than 80 percent are processed to a Burned Area product.
• Some burned areas are occasionally flagged as water in BA products. If the input Level 2 Pixel QA (QA_PIXEL) band has flagged a pixel as “water, terrain, low-confidence cloud”, it will likely be flagged as water in the Burn Probability (BP) and Burn Classification (BC) bands. This usually happens when there are terrain shadows within the burned area.
• The product metadata files (.xml or .json) lists the band information for both the burn classification and burn probability. The metadata also lists the band information for the input Landsat U.S. ARD tile used to generate the BA science product. 

Collection 2 Burned Area Product Improvements

While no major changes were made from C1 to C2 Burned Area, the following updates were made:

• Added a new Browse file to the BA product package
• Corrected a bug discovered in C1 where pixels in the top row (northern edge) and left column (western edge) of the Landsat U.S. ARD tile were incorrectly classified as not-burned in the BC layer
• Modification to allow BA to grow in a diagonal direction vs. just up/down and sideways

Retrained the model due to the Python 3 upgrade, which caused some very minor differences in the outputs

Additional Information

• Landsat Missions Collection 2 Burned Area webpage
• Landsat Collection 2 Level-3 Burned Area Data Format Control Book
• Landsat Collection 2 Level-3 Burned Area Algorithm Description Document

Access Data

Landsat Collection 2 Burned Area products are available for download from EarthExplorer. The data are located under the Landsat category, Landsat Collection 2 Level-3 Science Products subcategory, and listed as Landsat 4-8 C2 Burned Area. Visit the Landsat Data Access webpage for information about downloading C2 DSWE products.   

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

Landsat Collection 2 Level-3 Burned Area (BA) Science Product Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number: 10.5066/P999KPGS

Citation Information

There are no restrictions on the use of Landsat Collection 2 Level-3 Science Products. It is not a requirement of data use, but the following citations may be used in publication or presentation materials to acknowledge the USGS as a data source and to credit the original research.

Landsat Collection 2 Level 3 Burned Area (BA) Science Product courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.