Daily Fire Occurrence in Ukraine from 2002 to 2008

Abstract

The spatial and temporal extent of daily fire activity in Ukraine at a 1 km × 1 km resolution from 2002 to 2008 is investigated based on active fire detections by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. During this period about 20,000 fires were detected annually in Ukraine. Ukraine has two distinct fire seasons – spring (March, April, and May) and summer/early fall (July, August, and September). Summer and early fall was the main fire season, accounting for 77% of total active fire detections, while spring detections comprised only 17% of the total. The fire activity was mostly associated with agricultural burning; 91% of active fires were on agricultural land. The agricultural burning was dominated by burning stubble residue following ­harvest of winter wheat. The summer fire activity was highly correlated with annual wheat production (r = 0.81, p < 0.05). The minimum (2003) and maximum (2008) years of Ukraine fire activity deviated from the 7-year mean by −79% and +114% respectively, and coincided with the extremes of low and high wheat production in Ukraine during the study period (3.6 million tons in 2003 and 25.9 million tons in 2008).