Abstract
Abstract. Vegetation fires have been acknowledged as an environmental process of global scale, which affects the chemical composition of the troposphere, and has profound ecological and climatic impacts. However, considerable uncertainty remains, especially concerning intra and inter-annual variability of fire incidence. The main goals of our global-scale study were to characterise spatial-temporal patterns of fire activity, to identify broad geographical areas with similar vegetation fire dynamics, and to analyse the relationship between fire activity and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. This study relies on 10 years (mid 1996–mid 2006) of screened European Space Agency World Fire Atlas (WFA) data, obtained from Along Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR) and Advanced ATSR (AATSR) imagery. Empirical Orthogonal Function analysis was used to reduce the dimensionality of the dataset. Regions of homogeneous fire dynamics were identified with cluster analysis, and interpreted based on their eco-climatic characteristics. The impact of 1997–1998 El Niño is clearly dominant over the study period, causing increased fire activity in a variety of regions and ecosystems, with variable timing. Overall, this study provides the first global decadal assessment of spatial-temporal fire variability and confirms the usefulness of the screened WFA for global fire ecoclimatology research.
Highlights
Vegetation fires are an ecological process strongly responsive to climatic drivers, which have substantial impacts on biogeochemical cycles, at scales ranging from local to global
The El Nino – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the best known of these mechanisms, but similar roles have been assigned to the Arctic Oscillation (AO) (Balzter et al, 2005; Patra et al, 2005), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) (Kitzberger et al, 2007), the Indian Ocean Dipole and the North Atlantic Oscillation (Patra et al, 2005)
Since there is no optimal criterion to decide on the number of Principal Components (PCs)/Empirical Orthogonal Function (EOF) pairs that ought to be retained (Wilks, 2005), and taking into account that the aim of our study is to retain the most outstanding events, we adopted the approach based on the so-called Log-Eigenvalue (LEV) diagram (Craddock and Flood, 1969)
Summary
Vegetation fires are an ecological process strongly responsive to climatic drivers, which have substantial impacts on biogeochemical cycles, at scales ranging from local to global. As an indicator of the relevance of this phenomenon, reports from various sources estimate fires to affect on average. Local phenomena, it becomes globally relevant due to the integrating role of the atmosphere in two distinct ways. Combustion products are entrained and transported at wide range of distances, depending on the nature of the chemical species, atmospheric stability, and fire intensity (Damoah et al, 2004). The second globalising effect of the atmosphere occurs through the synchronisation of fire weather conditions at distant locations, via teleconnection mechanisms induced by climatic modes. The El Nino – Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the best known of these mechanisms, but similar roles have been assigned to the Arctic Oscillation (AO) (Balzter et al, 2005; Patra et al, 2005), Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) (Kitzberger et al, 2007), the Indian Ocean Dipole and the North Atlantic Oscillation (Patra et al, 2005)
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