Series · Climate & Perils
Wildfires
Two decades of satellite-measured burned area for every country on Earth, each nation's fire seasons ranked against its own baseline, and the seasons when fire met cities and rewrote the loss record.
3 episodes
- Source
- NASA MODIS burned area (MCD64A1)
- Coverage
- 2002 to 2023, global · monthly by country and region
- Catalogue
- 555 severe fire seasons
- Peril type
- Climatological (fire weather)
- Updated
- Dec 2023
Latest season & record context · experienced risk
New episode: The Burning Season
5 Jul 2026
Episodes
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.
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.