Two Decades of Satellite Observations of Carbon Monoxide Confirm the Increase in Northern Hemispheric Wildfires
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Date
2022-09-12
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Citation of Original Publication
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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Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
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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.