March 3 () –
Northern fires, which typically account for 10% of global carbon dioxide emissions from fires, contributed 23% in 2021, reveals a study in ‘Science’.
“The boreal forests could be a carbon time bomb, and the recent increases in emissions from wildfires that we are seeing make me fear that the clock is ticking.” it’s a statement study author Steven Davis of the University of California Irvine.
Extreme forest fires, which affect the climate due to the carbon dioxide they emit, are becoming more frequent. Wildfires in tropical forests have received notable attention for their emissions, while those in boreal forests have attracted much less attention.
And this despite the fact that boreal forests are the largest terrestrial biome in the world and that fires in these regions release 10 to 20 times more carbon per unit area burned than other ecosystems. Therefore, monitoring emissions from fires in these high-carbon ecosystems is critical to understanding Earth’s temperature and risks to climate change mitigation efforts.
Satellite-based approaches to monitoring carbon dioxide emissions from fires may miss emissions from small fires, while bottom-up modeling approaches may miss scorched-ground fires.
Also, carbon dioxide is difficult to specifically attribute to fires; can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of yearswhich means that the background carbon dioxide concentrations are quite high compared to the carbon dioxide emissions released by small fires.
To better control emissions from fires, and particularly in the boreal regions, Tsinghua University (China) researcher Bo Zheng and colleagues used a new method to indirectly track carbon dioxide emissions from fires.
It was about controlling carbon monoxide, which has a much shorter life in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. The authors used satellite data from the Measurements Of Pollution In The Troposphere instrument (MOPITT), the satellite instrument with the longest continuous time series of carbon dioxide measurements to date, to estimate weekly global carbon monoxide emissions and carbon dioxide from fires in the boreal regions using an atmospheric inversion system approach.
This revealed a two-decade trend of expanding summer fires in boreal forests since 2000 and record emissions from boreal forest fires in 2021, coinciding with a severe heatwave, drought and high water deficit in the regions. borealis that year.
“Our data analysis implies a link between extensive boreal fires and climatic factors (especially rising temperatures or heat waves),” they write. And they point out that boreal ecosystems could become in the future in the main regions of origin of intensive fires and carbon emissions from fires.
They also state that the approach they have developed to monitor estimates of fire emissions will be useful in developing a more integrated system capable of monitoring and evaluating global and regional carbon budgets from fires, post-fire land-use flows and the net impact of fire emissions on atmospheric carbon dioxide.
