Over the past 4 decades, there has been a doubling of the annual area burned across the North American boreal region [1], resulting in new challenges for fire management and intensified concerns about the effect that an increase in large wildfires may have on ecosystems and atmospheric carbon. The severity of a fire can be of great importance to the post fire environment, ecological recovery, and in quantifying carbon that is emitted to the atmosphere, in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2) carbon monoxide (CO), and other greenhouse gasses [2, 3]. In this paper we review the utility and issues of using remote sensing to assess fire and burn severity in Alaskan boreal forests. Here, fire severity refers to the immediate impacts of fire on the environment, while burn severity references the degree of ecological change as a result of the fire [4].