Smoke Propagation During Fire in Kalimantan and Sumatra in 2015 and 2019

Abstract

AbstractThe forest and land fire events in Indonesia reached a peak in 2015 and 2019 since the last decade associated with strong and moderate El Nino phenomena. Those events have been produced a high concentration of smoke. This study aims to understand the propagation patterns of smoke from Kalimantan and Sumatra during those cases and their influence on the aerosol optical thickness (AOT) and visibility. The hotspots data observed by Terra, Aqua, and SNPP satellites were used to represent the forest and land fires, while the AOT data was obtained from the SNPP-VIIRS. Furthermore, the forward trajectory of the Hysplit model was applied to investigate the smoke propagation using matrix sources with a spatial resolution of 1° × 1°. The result shows that the background wind influenced the smoke propagation that led to transboundary smoke occurrences in September. Moreover, the events of the forest and land fires affected the higher value of AOT and lower visibility. The AOT distributions have a similar pattern to the smoke propagation. However, the visibility pattern does not perform the consistency with the propagation.KeywordsAOTFirePropagationSmokeVisibility