Two Decades of Satellite Observations of Carbon Monoxide Confirm the Increase in Northern Hemispheric Wildfires

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https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/13/9/1479

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https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13091479
 http://hdl.handle.net/11603/25728

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UMBC Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET)
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https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5984-3772

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2022-09-12

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journal articles
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Yurganov, Leonid, and Vadim Rakitin. 2022. "Two Decades of Satellite Observations of Carbon Monoxide Confirm the Increase in Northern Hemispheric Wildfires" Atmosphere 13, no. 9: 1479. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13091479

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Abstract

Biomass burning is an important and changing component of the global and hemispheric carbon cycles. Boreal forest fires in Russia and Canada are significant sources of greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4). The influence of carbon monoxide (CO) on the greenhouse effect is practically absent: its main absorption bands of 4.6 and 2.3 μm are far away from the climatically important spectral regions. Meanwhile, CO concentrations in fire plumes are closely related to CO2 and CH4 emissions from fires. On the other hand, satellite measurements of CO are much simpler than those for the aforementioned gases. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) provides a satellite-based CO data set since October, 2002 up to now. This communication presents estimates of CO emissions from biomass burning north of 30° N using a simple two-box massbalance model. These results correlate closely with independently estimated CO emissions from the GFED4 bottom-up data base. Both ones reported record high emissions in 2021 throughout two decades, double the annual emissions comparing to the previous years. There have been two years with extremely high emissions (2003 and 2021), but for the rest of data upward trend with a rate of 3.6 ± 2.2 Tg CO yr-2 (4.8 ± 2.7% yr-1), was found. A similar rate of CO emission follows from the GFED4 data.