Publications

Journal publications

Forkel, M., Wessollek, C., Huijnen, V., Andela, N., de Laat, A., Kinalczyk, D., Marrs, C., van Wees, D., Bastos, A., Ciais, P., Fawcett, D., Kaiser, J. W., Klauberg, C., Kutchartt, E., Leite, R., Li, W., Silva, C., Sitch, S., Goncalves De Souza, J., Zaehle, S., and Plummer, S. (2025) Burning of woody debris dominates fire emissions in the Amazon and Cerrado Nature Geoscience, 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01637-5.

This paper compares the three Sense4Fire approaches (TUD-S4F, GFA-S4F and KNMI-S5p) with other fire emission datasets and focusses specifically on the role of fuels for fire emissions. A full description of the TUD-S4F approach is given in the Methods and Supplementary Information. 

de Laat, A. T. J., Andela, N., Forkel, M., Huijnen, V., Kinalczyk, D., and van Wees, D. (2025).
Sentinel-5p reveals unexplained large wildfire carbon emissions in the Amazon in 2024
Geophysical Research Letters, 53, e2025GL115123, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL115123

This publication presents the application of the Sense4Fire approaches in near-real time for the extreme fire season in the Amazon region in 2024. 

de Laat, A., Huijnen, V., Andela, N., and Forkel, M. (2024) Assessment of satellite observation-based wildfire emissions inventories using TROPOMI data and IFS-COMPO model simulations EGUsphere, 1–81, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-732.

This preprint presents the first evaluation of fire emission estimates using the KNMI-S5p approach. 

Andela, N., Morton, D. C., Schroeder, W., Chen, Y., Brando, P. M., and Randerson, J. T. (2022) Tracking and classifying Amazon fire events in near real time Science Advances, 8, eabd2713, https://doi.org/doi:10.1126/sciadv.abd2713.

This publication describes the first version of the GFA-S4F approach. 

Technical documents

A series of deliverables such as Algorithm Theoretical Baseline Documents (ATBD), Product Validation Reports (PVR) and Impact Assessment Reports (IAR) have been produced in Sense4Fire and published along with the Databases. In order to keep the list of deliverables concise for the potential user of our data products, we list and publish the documents that relate to a certain version of the database.

The fourth version of the Algorithm Theoretical Baseline Document (ATBDv4) provides an updated and complete description of the most recent versions (GFA-S4F-v0.3, TUD-S4F-v0.3, KNMI-S5p-v0.2) of three approaches used in Sense4Fire. The three approaches were previously described in ATBDv2.1 and ATBDv3 (Forkel et al., 2023b, 2024) as well as in the corresponding scientific publications (Andela et al., 2022; Forkel et al., 2025; de Laat et al., 2026). ATBDv4 documents advancements since ATBDv3, reflecting the integration of new Earth observation datasets and methodological developments in the approaches.