Wildfire weather, intensity and smoke emissions of large-scale fire events in 2019

Effective monitoring of global wildfire activity requires comprehensive knowledge of changing environmental (including atmospheric and hydrological) conditions, fuel availability and routine observations of fire locations and intensity. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) through its operation of, and contribution to, different Copernicus Services is in a unique position to provide detailed information on the conditions leading to wildland fire activity, the evolution of wildfires, and their potential impacts, when they occur. Fire weather forecasts from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service, and surface climate anomalies from the Copernicus Climate Change Service both provide context to the environmental conditions required for wildfires to persist. Analyses based on observations of fire radiative power, along with analyses and forecasts of associated atmospheric pollutants, from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service aid in quantifying the scale and intensity in near-real-time and the subsequent atmospheric impacts. During 2019, regions of anomalously hot and dry surface conditions in Arctic Siberia and southeast Australia experienced large-scale, long-duration wildfires which burned thousands of square kilometres with a total intensity that was significantly above the average of the previous 16 years of data in those regions. We present an overview of the evolution of fire activity in Siberia between June-August 2019, and Australia between September 2019-January 2020, based on ECMWF/Copernicus data for fire weather, climate anomalies and active fires. We will show that the different datasets, while being relatively independent, show a strong correspondence and provide a wealth of information vital to understanding global wildfires, their underlying causes and environmental impacts.

How to cite: Parrington, M., Di Giuseppe, F., Smith, T., Vitolo, C., Garrigues, S., Wooster, M., Zhang, T., Kaiser, J., Ades, M., Agusti-Panareda, A., Barre, J., Bousserez, N., Engelen, R., Flemming, J., Inness, A., Kipling, Z., Peuch, V.-H., Vamborg, F., and Coughlan, R.: Wildfire weather, intensity and smoke emissions of large-scale fire events in 2019, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-11786, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-11786, 2020