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This paper presents a new global burned area (BA) product, generated from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) red (R) and near-infrared (NIR) reflectances and thermal anomaly data, thus providing the highest spatial resolution (approx. 250 m) among the existing global BA datasets. The product includes the full times series (2001–2016) of the Terra-MODIS archive. The BA detection algorithm was based on monthly composites of daily images, using temporal and spatial distance to active fires. The algorithm has two steps, the first one aiming to reduce commission errors by selecting the most clearly burned pixels (seeds), and the second one targeting to reduce omission errors by applying contextual analysis around the seed pixels. This product was developed within the European Space Agency's (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme, under the Fire Disturbance project (Fire_cci). The final output includes two types of BA files: monthly full-resolution continental tiles and biweekly global grid files at a degraded resolution of 0.25^∘. Each set of products includes several auxiliary variables that were defined by the climate users to facilitate the ingestion of the product into global dynamic vegetation and atmospheric emission models. Average annual burned area from this product was 3.81 Mkm², with maximum burning in 2011 (4.1 Mkm²) and minimum in 2013 (3.24 Mkm²). The validation was based on a stratified random sample of 1200 pairs of Landsat images, covering the whole globe from 2003 to 2014. The validation indicates an overall accuracy of 0.9972, with much higher errors for the burned than …