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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ESSDD</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>Earth System Science Data Discussions</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ESSDD</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">1866-3591</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name></publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/essd-2026-116</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>CONFEX: A Database for CONUS Fire EXtent</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Qadiri</surname>
<given-names>Raja Zubair Zahoor</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4867-3506</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Cerrai</surname>
<given-names>Diego</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Eversource Energy Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>19</day>
<month>03</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>18</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Raja Zubair Zahoor Qadiri</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-116/">This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-116/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-116/essd-2026-116.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-116/essd-2026-116.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>This article presents the CONUS Fire EXtent (CONFEX) database. CONFEX is based on the VIIRS S-NPP 375 m active fire product and provides wildfire perimeters, centroids, ignition locations, and start and end dates for 2012&amp;ndash;2024 across CONUS and Alaska. The algorithm extracts hotspot detections from VIIRS S-NPP, clusters them into fire events using a spatio-temporal DBSCAN approach and derives a perimeter polygon and centroid for each event, assigning event-level attributes. When evaluated against MTBS using regional area-threshold filters, the algorithm obtained area-based F1 scores of 67 % (western CONUS; &amp;gt;1000 acres), 77 % (Alaska; &amp;gt;1000 acres), and 26 % (eastern CONUS; &amp;gt;500 acres); and when evaluated against California FRAP (excluding the 2020 tuning year), an area-based F1 of 69 % was found, demonstrating the ability to aggregate VIIRS hotspots into spatially and temporally coherent fire events. &amp;nbsp;To our knowledge, CONFEX is the first publicly available, moderately high-resolution wildfire-extent dataset developed for the CONUS and Alaska regions using the VIIRS S-NPP 375 m active fire product. The database provides a valuable resource for researchers to study fire regimes in CONUS and Alaska.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="18"/></counts>
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