Total ozone increase associated with forest fires over the Indonesian region and its relation to the El Niño-Southern oscillation

Abstract

Significant increases of total ozone were observed both by the total ozone mapping spectrometer (TOMS) and by the Brewer spectrophotometer in Indonesia in September and October of 1994 and 1997, during the El Niño periods, when extensive forest fires were reported in Sumatra Island, Kalimantan (the southern part of Borneo Island) and south New Guinea. The two observations were consistent with each other, and the total ozone increases were attributed to the tropospheric ozone increases because their amplitudes agreed with those of integrated tropospheric ozone increases derived from ozonesonde observations. The TOMS data indicated that the horizontal distributions and temporal variations of the ozone increases were similar in both years; the ozone increases were found mainly over Sumatra Island and the Malay Peninsula in September, and spread out from Kalimantan to the central Indian Ocean in October. This ozone distribution was partly different from the reported fire areas. This difference suggested the importance of the horizontal advection due to the easterly wind in the lower troposphere and of the vertical transport due to the upward wind at the west of Sumatra Island, in the ozone maximum area. Distinctive total ozone increases similar to those in 1994 and 1997 repeatedly appeared over the Indonesian region in the TOMS data between 1979 and 1998. The average ozone increase in this region was estimated by subtracting the background structure of total ozone in the tropics, and this analysis showed that large ozone increases mostly occurred in the dry season during the El Niño periods when the precipitation decreased significantly and extensive forest fires occurred frequently in Indonesia.