Trace Gas Emissions from Boreal Forest Fires

Principal Investigators:

Eric Kasischke, Jenny Hewson, Edward Hyer, Nancy French (Altarum), Anatoly Sukhinin (Russian Academy of Sciences), James Randerson (California Institute of Technology), Brian Stocks (Canadian Forest Service), Lori Bruhwiler (NOAA-CMDL)

The focus of this NASA funded research is to estimate emissions originating from fires in the boreal forest region and to determine the influence of these emissions on intra- and inter-annual variations in the atmospheric concentration of CO2, CO, CH4 and other trace gases. Large fires occur throughout the boreal forest region between April and October, but have a wide variation in size, location and timing, dependent upon climate patterns. While fires are mapped in the North American boreal forest by fire management agencies, not all fires are mapped in Russia.

In this project, we used available fire maps in North America, and satellite data from AVHRR and other satellite sensors to quantify the spatial and temporal patterns of fire in the boreal forest region for the period 1995 to 2002. We created potential emissions maps for the boreal forest region through combining available maps of biomass distribution with ecosystem specific models of expected fire behavior, fire severity, and emission factors. The potential emissions and fire maps were then combined to estimate emissions on a 1 by 1 degree grid at weekly time intervals for 1995 to 2002. These estimated emissions are being used as inputs for atmospheric transport models in order to compare them to surface and satellite observations. The observations include those available through the NOAA-CMDL’s surface monitoring network, as well as those available from NASA’s Measurement of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) instrument onboard the TERRA satellite system. The results from this study are showing that trace gas emissions from fires are making significant contributions to variations in atmospheric trace gases in the northern hemisphere region. A further discussion of the results from this study can be found at http://www.geog.umd.edu/borealfire/eric.html.

Example publication: Kasischke, E.S., and L.M. Bruhwiler, Emissions of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane from boreal forest fires in 1998, Journal of Geophysical Research 108 (D1), FFR 2-1 to 2-14, 2003.