IGN · Fire drivers

Ignition Layer

Gradient-boosted anthropic ignition model + LIS/OTD lightning climatology · v0.1 · 2026-07

Where fires start: human-context ignition susceptibility (captures the wildland-urban-interface hump — peaks rural/exurban, falls in fuel-less urban cores) plus lightning ignition density, combined into a relative total propensity. Feeds the Petrel Wildfire pipeline. v0.1 is qualitatively checked against GFED fire geography; quantitative skill scoring lands in v0.2.

Anthropic · lightning · total — global composite at native 0.05°

What ships in the bundle

3 global ~5 km (0.05°) GeoTIFFs (~32 MB total) plus the full documentation set. All files are Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs with internal tiling and overviews — fast for both bulk download and windowed reads.

FileDtypeUnitsDescription

ignition_density_anthro_0p05deg_90m.tifuint16 (SCALE)P 0–1Anthropic ignition susceptibility P(fire | human context)

ignition_density_lightning_0p05deg_90m.tifuint16 (SCALE)events/km²/yrLightning ignition density — LIS/OTD flash × p(ignition | flash)

ignition_density_total_0p05deg_90m.tifuint16 (SCALE)propensity 0–1Total relative ignition propensity 1 − (1−Pₐ)(1−Pₗ) — not an absolute rate

Note: filenames carry a legacy _90m suffix; the native grid resolution for this Layer is ~5 km (0.05°).

Method

Inputs · GHSL R2023A (population, built-up, settlement), HYDE 3.3 cropland/grazing, NASA LIS/OTD flash climatology, Beck 2018 Köppen-Geiger

Training labels · NASA FIRMS MODIS/VIIRS fire detections (fire presence, 2015-2023)

Method · Gradient-boosted anthropic ignition model + LIS/OTD lightning climatology

Documentation

Download

Free for non-commercial use. Account required.

# $PETREL_API_KEY = your API key (tlk.…) from the dashboard — free tier works.

# 1. Fetch 1-hour signed URLs for every file in the bundle:
curl -s -H "X-API-Key: $PETREL_API_KEY" \
  https://api.petreldata.io/v1/layer/ignition/v0.1/bundle > bundle.json

# 2. Download the full layer (~32 MB):
mkdir -p ignition_v0.1
jq -r '.files[] | [.url, .name] | @tsv' bundle.json | \
  while IFS=$'\t' read -r url name; do
    curl -s "$url" -o "ignition_v0.1/$name"
  done

License & citation

License: CC-BY-NC-4.0. Free for academic, research, and other non-commercial use. For commercial licensing, contact licensing@petreldata.io.

Citation:

Petrel (2026). Petrel Ignition Layer v0.1.
https://petreldata.io/layers/ignition
CC-BY-NC-4.0