Abstract
<jats:p>As the MODIS era approaches its operational end, maintaining the long-term consistency of global burned area (BA) records is essential for fire-climate research, emissions assessment and climate applications. Here, we present MRBA60, a harmonised global monthly BA dataset designed to ensure continuity between MODIS-based FireCCI51 and Sentinel-3-based FireCCIS311.MRBA60 should be used as a combined time series: MRBA60H provides the harmonised historical component for 2003-2018, while FireCCIS311 provides the continuation from 2019 onwards. The combination of both components is referred to as MRBA60, providing a continuous global BA record at 0.25°. For the historical period, biome- and month-specific Random Forest models were trained during the 2019-2024 overlap between FireCCI51 and FireCCIS311, using auxiliary predictors related to active fires, fire radiative power, climate, vegetation and spatial gradients. Model outputs were then adjusted through quantile mapping to better reproduce the FireCCIS311 BA distribution, while preserving historical extreme events not represented in the calibration period.During 2003-2024, MRBA60 estimates a mean global BA of approximately 5.5 Mkm² yr⁻¹, compared with 4.4 Mkm² yr⁻¹ from FireCCI51. This represents a cumulative increase of ~24.5 Mkm² relative to FireCCI51, equivalent to ~1.1 Mkm² additional BA per year and a relative increase of 25%. Differences are seasonally heterogeneous: the largest increases occur in Sep-Oct-Nov and Mar-Apr-May, while Jun-Jul-Aug shows the smallest differences. Despite this increase in absolute BA magnitude, MRBA60 preserves the long-term global decline in burned area, with a cumulative reduction of -25.1% between 2003 and 2024, compared with -33.3% estimated by FireCCI51. Overall, MRBA60 provides a traceable and physically consistent time series for analysing BA trends across the MODIS-Sentinel transition, and is designed to support studies of fire regimes, climate-model evaluation, fire-climate attribution, emissions estimation and ecological impact assessment. MRBA60H is available through CEDA: https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/db75c5f51ee240ae8743355dcebbb9b9/. FireCCIS311 is available through CEDA: https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/da8e669a74334c82a56e0b470bc4ef04/.Acknowledgements: This work was developed within the framework of the European Space Agency Fire Climate Change Initiative (FireCCI) project, contract Nº 4000126706/19/I-NB. We acknowledge CEDA for data archiving and distribution, and the providers of the satellite, climate and validation datasets used in the development and evaluation of MRBA60.</jats:p>