Measuring the Carbon Footprint from Wildfires and Crop Burning Using Satellite Data

Climate change and altered land use patterns have increased the risk and frequency of wildfires over the last decade. Today's estimates of the carbon impact of wildfires deploy a bottom-up approach to estimate the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere. Various parameters and variability in this approach make it difficult to make quick and accurate estimations of the carbon emissions from wildfires. We propose using satellite data from NASA’s OCO-2 and MODIS satellites to directly estimate the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere from wildfires. A similar approach can be used to measure carbon emissions from crop-burning activities in the Gangetic plains- another significant source of carbon emissions. Direct measurements of carbon emissions can help policymakers and researchers make data-based decisions to prevent forests from becoming carbon sources instead of carbon sinks. 

In our presentation, we will present a new data platform to estimate carbon emissions from localized wildfires and crop-burning instances using publicly available satellite data. The platform has pre-built functions and pipelines, allowing researchers to perform data analysis without the need to write cumbersome code. The underlying data lake combines NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2 and OCO-3) data with other data sources (e.g., MODIS-based fire data) that facilitate more accurate and complete modeling of the dynamics of biomass burning and the impact they have on their immediate geography and the planet’s climate system at large.