A new global burned area product for climate assessment of fire impacts

Kevin Tansey,Duarte Oom,Emilio Chuvieco,Florent Mouillot,Chao Yue,Angelika Heil,Jose Miguel Pereira,Itziar Alonso‐Canas,Marc Padilla

doi:10.1111/geb.12440

Abstract

AbstractAim This paper presents a new global burned area (BA) product developed within the framework of the European Space Agency's Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme, along with a first assessment of its potentials for atmospheric and carbon cycle modelling.Innovation Methods are presented for generating a new global BA product, along with a comparison with existing BA products, in terms of BA extension, fire size and shapes and emissions derived from biomass burnings.Main conclusions Three years of the global BA product were produced, accounting for a total BA of between 360 and 380 Mha year−1. General omission and commission errors for BA were 0.76 and 0.64, but they decreased to 0.51 and 0.52, respectively, for sites with more than 10% BA. Intercomparison with other existing BA datasets found similar spatial and temporal trends, mainly with the BA included in the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED4), although regional differences were found (particularly in the 2006 fires of eastern Europe). The simulated carbon emissions from biomass burning averaged 2.1 Pg C year−1.

Highlights

Biomass burning is one of the key components of atmospheric and terrestrial systems, as it influences emissions of various gases and aerosols, global carbon budgets and ecosystem dynamics (Krawchuk et al, 2009)
Fire disturbance has been named by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) programme (GCOS 2011) as an essential climate variable (ECV)
In 2010 the European Space Agency (ESA) launched a climate change initiative (CCI) programme to generate satellite-derived products that follow the specifications of GCOS (Hollmann et al, 2013)

Summary

Introduction

Biomass burning is one of the key components of atmospheric and terrestrial systems, as it influences emissions of various gases and aerosols, global carbon budgets and ecosystem dynamics (Krawchuk et al, 2009). Fires have biophysical effects by altering the vegetation type and structure, changing the surface albedo and energy balance (Beck et al, 2011; Rocha & Shaver, 2011) For these reasons, fire disturbance has been named by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) programme (GCOS 2011) as an essential climate variable (ECV). The Fire_cci project is part of the CCI programme and aims to develop global information on burned area (BA) following the requirements of atmospheric and vegetation modellers (Mouillot et al, 2014)

Methods

Results

Conclusion