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Biomass burning on natural and agricultural lands has profound effects on atmospheric chemistry, climate, and air quality. Over the past decade, a number of global fire emissions inventories have been developed based on near-real time detection of actively burning fires by the MODIS instruments. However, the MODIS instruments provide variable and incomplete global sampling of fire activity, resulting in large uncertainty in the spatiotemporal accuracy of emissions inventories. Here, we compared active fire products from MODIS and VIIRS to characterize product-specific shortcomings of each system with the goal to develop a new, more accurate, global emissions inventory. Among all products, the VIIRS 375m product was most sensitive to global fire activity and detected up to 55% more energy release from fires than the comparable 1km MODIS product in the tropics. Differences originated from improved …