doi:10.5194/acp-15-13217-2015 © Author(s) 2015. CC Attribution 3.0 License. LSA SAF Meteosat FRP products – Part 1: Algorithms, product contents, and analysis

Abstract. Characterizing changes in landscape fire activity at better than hourly temporal resolution is achievable us-ing thermal observations of actively burning fires made from geostationary Earth Observation (EO) satellites. Over the last decade or more, a series of research and/or operational “ac-tive fire ” products have been developed from geostationary EO data, often with the aim of supporting biomass burning fuel consumption and trace gas and aerosol emission calcula-tions. Such Fire Radiative Power (FRP) products are gener-ated operationally from Meteosat by the Land Surface Anal-ysis Satellite Applications Facility (LSA SAF) and are avail-able freely every 15 min in both near-real-time and archived form. These products map the location of actively burning fires and characterize their rates of thermal radiative energy release (FRP), which is believed proportional to rates o