The Global Fire Atlas is a global dataset that tracks the day-to-day dynamics of individual fires to determine the timing and location of ignitions, fire size, duration, daily expansion, fire line length, speed, and direction of spread. These individual fire characteristics were derived based on the Global Fire Atlas algorithm and estimated day of burn information at 500-m resolution from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Collection 6 MCD64A1 burned area product. The algorithm identified 13.3 million individual fires (>=21 ha or 0.21 km2; the size of one MODIS pixel) over the 2003-2016 study period.