Overview

The CAMS Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) assimilates fire radiative power (FRP) observations from satellite-based sensors to produce estimates of biomass burning emissions. FRP observations currently assimilated in CAMS GFAS are MODIS and VIIRS active fire products (https://ladsweb.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/). The rate of release of thermal radiation by a fire is believed to be related to the rate at which fuel is being consumed and smoke produced. Therefore, these FRP data are used (after screening for spurious signal) in the global estimation of open vegetation fire trace gas and particulate emissions. GFAS includes also information about injection heights derived from the same FRP observations combined with meteorological information from the ECMWF operational weather forecast.

CAMS GFAS data includes: FRP, burnt dry matter (combustion rate), injection height and biomass burning emissions.

This page provides the documentation for GFAS v1.4.2. 

Evolution of the CAMS Global Fire Assimilation System

GFAS undergoes regular enhancements in order to better meet user needs and improve the service. 

Temporal frequency

GFAS v1.4.2 runs hourly and produces hourly and 24-hour rolling average output.

• Hourly fields are based on the next hour observations with respect to valid time.
• 24-hour rolling average fields are based on the next 0-23 hourly fields (next 0-24 hour observations) with respect to valid time.

Data access

The latest seven days of the data can be accessed through the SFTP/FTP/HTTPS data access. For a list of variables available on the FTP please see here.

Before downloading data, users must accept the license on the Atmosphere Data Store.

Data availability

• Hourly fields data are produced at about 7.5 hours after their valid time.
• 24-hour rolling average fields are produced at about 1 day + 6.5 hours after their valid time.

Data might be available earlier but it is not guaranteed.

Spatial grid

Data are available globally on a regular latitude-longitude grid with a horizontal resolution of 0.1 degrees.

Data format

The GFAS File format is GRIB1. See What are GRIB files and how can I read them for more information.

Injection height parameters

Injection height parameters (see Table 1) provide information on the height at which a fire releases emissions into the atmosphere due to the convection related to the high intensity of the fire. GFAS v1.4.2 uses the Integrated Monitoring and Modelling System for wildland fires (IS4FIRES) to calculate the injection height, based on satellite observed FRP and the ECMWF forecast of key atmospheric parameters. More information on the injection height calculations in GFAS can be found in Remy et al. (2017).

Analysis surface parameters

The analysis surface parameters (see Table 2) provided by GFAS are hourly fire radiative power, hourly and 24-hour average emissions fluxes of pyrogenic atmospheric species based on a combination of the available satellite FRP observations and the GFAS analysis of the previous day. The assimilation of FRP observations is performed applying a Kalman filter to fill in any observational gaps (due to, e.g., cloud cover) and to propagate the previous day's analysis forwards in time and take into account the new FRP observations. More information on the GFAS technical details can be found in Kaiser et al. (2012).

Parameter listing

Table 1 below provides the injection height parameters and Table 2 provides analysis surface parameters.

Table1: Gridded injection height parameters from IS4FIRES (last reviewed on 04 Dec 2025 )

Table 2: CAMS GFAS analysis surface parameters (last reviewed on 04 Dec 2025 )

^*available only as hourly fields; not screened for spurious signal

Satellites and instruments

The table below presents the observations used in GFAS v1.4.2. FRP observations are from the MODIS instruments on the NASA Terra and Aqua satellites which were launched in December 1999 and June 2002 respectively, and the VIIRS instrument on the NASA/NOAA SNPP satellite which was launched in October 2011.

Table3: observations used in GFAS v1.4.2(last reviewed on 04 Dec 2025 )

Q&A

Users can find the Q&A for wildfires here.

References

Kaiser, J. W., Heil, A., Andreae, M. O., Benedetti, A., Chubarova, N., Jones, L., Morcrette, J.-J., Razinger, M., Schultz, M. G., Suttie, M., and van der Werf, G. R. (2012). Biomass burning emissions estimated with a global fire assimilation system based on observed fire radiative power. BG, 9:527-554. [PDF]

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Francesca Di Giuseppe, Samuel Rémy, Florian Pappenberger, and Fredrik Wetterhall, 2018: Combining fire radiative power observations with the fire weather index improves the estimation of fire emissions, Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 18, 5359–5370, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2017-790

Rémy, S., A. Veira, R. Paugam, M. Sofiev, J. W. Kaiser, F. Marenco, S. P. Burton, A. Benedetti, R. J. Engelen, R. Ferrare, and J. W. Hair, 2017: Two global data sets of daily fire emission injection heights since 2003, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 17, 2921-2942, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-17-2921-2017.

N. Andela (VUA), J.W. Kaiser (ECMWF, KCL), A. Heil (FZ Jülich), T.T. van Leeuwen (VUA), G.R. van der Werf (VUA), M.J. Wooster (KCL), S. Remy (ECMWF) and M.G. Schultz (FZ Jülich), Assessment of the Global Fire Assimilation System (GFASv1). [PDF]

Xu et al. (2010) New GOES imager algorithms for cloud and active fire detection and fire radiative power assessment across North, South and Central America. RSE Vol. 114

Heil et al. (2010) Assessment of the Real-Time Fire Emissions (GFASv0) by MACC, ECMWF Tech. Memo No. 628 [PDF]

Di Giuseppe, F, Remy, S, Pappenberger, F, Wetterhall, F (2016): Improving GFAS and CAMS biomass burning estimations by means of the Global ECMWF Fire Forecast system (GEFF), ECMWF Tech. Memo No. 790 [PDF]

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