The State of Wildfires Report builds a record of extreme fires of the past fire season, analyses the causes of some key events including the role of climate change, and presents projections of future likelihood of extreme wildfire events.

The time series data are one of UEA's major contributions to the State of Wildfires Report. The new analyses are regional summaries of the estimates of burned area, fire carbon emissions, and individual fire characteristics produced from NASA, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, and the Global Fire Atlas observations. The regional summaries are provided for various different layers, including countries, level-1 global administrative regions (e.g. States of the USA, Provinces of China), biomes, and IPCC regions.

The interactive chart highlights regional values of six key metrics of fire season extremity during each fire season since 2002. Fire seasons are defined as March-February for the purposes of this report. When a new layer is selected, the top five regions (ranked by highest value) for the selected variable are displayed by default. The metrics included are:

• Regional totals of Burned Area. A measure of the total extent of all fires combined in the selected regions, assessed for each fire season (unit: km²).
• Regional totals of Fire Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) Emissions. A measure of the amount of carbon emitted from fires into the atmosphere from all fires in the selected regions, assessed for each fire season (unit: Megatonnes CO₂).
• Regional Number of Fires. A measure of count of fires within the selected regions, assessed for each fire season (input unit: count). [Data begin in 2003].
• Regional 95^th Percentile Fire Size. A measure of the size that the top 5% largest fires reached in the selected regions, assessed for each fire season (unit: km²). [Data begin in 2003].
• Regional 95^th Percentile Fire Rate of Growth. A measure of the average daily rate at which the top 5% fastest fires expanded in the selected regions, assessed for each fire season (unit: km per day). [Data begin in 2003].
• The Average Fire's 95^th Percentile Fire Radiative Power (FRP) in each region. A measure of the typical peak intensity of the fires occurring in the selected regions, assessed for each fire season (input unit: Megawatts). [Data begin in 2003].

Please cite as:

Kelley, D. I., Burton, C. A., Di Giuseppe, F., Jones, M. W., et al. (2025). State of Wildfires 2024-25, Earth System Science Data, DOI TBC.

Jones, M. W., Andela, N., Brambleby, E., Chuvieco, E., Giglio, L., Kaiser, J. W., Parrington, M., Qu, Y., Torres-Vázquez, M. A., van der Werf, G., and Veraverbeke, S. (2025) State of Wildfires 2024-25: Regional Summaries of Burned Area, Fire Emissions, and Individual Fire Characteristics for National, Administrative and Biogeographical Regions [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15525674.