"The hots are getting hotter; the dries are getting drier; if you are in denial about climate change, come to California." California Gov. Gavin Newsome, in an address to the 2020 Democratic Convention
Across the planet, forests have gone up in flames while emitting 2.5 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
That number is equivalent to the total emissions from India from all sources in one year. Wildfires are now a source of significant co2 emissions, including "carbon gases, volatile organic compounds, and particulate matter, which influences global atmospheric composition and chemistry."
This year's record-breaking flames were just for July and August alone, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service announced.
Dhana Noor writes in Gismoda on the datasets from CAMS datasets:
Forests on multiple continents went up in smoke, spewing out billions of tons of carbon dioxide, new data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service shows. In July, wildfires emitted nearly 1.3 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, a record that was topped by August’s 1.4 gigatons. Between the two months, forest fires emitted an amount of carbon dioxide greater than all of India’s carbon emissions in a year.
The majority of those emissions came from wildfires two regions, western North America and Siberia. Blazes in both regions were fueled by heat waves, drought conditions, and low soil moisture levels—three hallmarks of the climate crisis. In the case of North America, monster fires are still burning in the U.S. and continue to threaten everything from homes and giant sequoias. What’s been most shocking about the fires in the northern hemisphere is, well, everything.
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It’s impossible to talk about these fires without talking about climate change. Hot, dry weather is becoming more common and can lead to megafires like those that have enveloped the northern hemisphere this year—and other recent years for that matter. The emissions from these fires, including some that burned through forests that corporations had bought to offset their emissions, will worsen the climate crisis and up the risk of even more damaging blazes to come.
From Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS):
Scientists from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) have been closely monitoring a summer of severe wildfires which have impacted many different countries across the Northern Hemisphere and caused record carbon emissions in July and August. CAMS, which is implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on behalf of the European Commission with funding from the EU, reports that not only large parts of the Northern Hemisphere were affected during this year’s boreal fire season, but the number of fires, their persistence and intensity were remarkable.
As the boreal fire season draws to a close, CAMS scientists reveal that:
- Dry conditions and heatwaves in the Mediterranean contributed to a wildfire hotspot with many intense and fast developing fires across the region, which created large amounts of smoke pollution.
- July was a record month globally in the GFAS dataset with 1258.8 megatonnes of CO2 released. More than half of the carbon dioxide was attributed to fires in North America and Siberia.
- According to GFAS data, August was a record month for fires as well, releasing an estimated 1384.6 megatonnes of CO2 globally into the atmosphere.
- Arctic wildfires released 66 megatonnes of CO2 between June and August 2021.
- Estimated CO2 emissions from wildfires in Russia as a whole from June to August amounted to 970 megatonnes, with the Sakha Republic and Chukotka accounting for 806 megatonnes.
Scientists at CAMS use satellite observations of active fires in near-real-time to estimate emissions and predict the impact of resulting air pollution. These observations provide a measure of the heat output of fires known as fire radiative power (FRP), which is related to the emission. CAMS estimates daily global fire emissions with its Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) using the FRP observations from the NASA MODIS satellite instruments. The estimated emissions of different atmospheric pollutants are used as a surface boundary condition in the CAMS forecast system, based on the ECMWF weather forecast system, which models the transport and chemistry of atmospheric pollutants, to predict how global air quality will be affected up to five days ahead.
Meanwhile, in drought-ravaged California, wildfires burn through the night.
“Firefighters are still fighting the fire at 10:00 or 11:00 at night when historically they thought they could stop at 8:00,” said Brian Potter, a research meteorologist with the U.S. Forest Service at the Pacific Northwest Research Station. “What that means is the fire managers don’t get a break.”
Satellite data and ground reports indicate wildfire activity has increased at night in recent decades, meaning firefighters have less time to rest and regroup overnight. This year, the Caldor fire southwest of Lake Tahoe, which has consumed more than 220,000 acres as of Sept. 24, more than doubled overnight early on. The Windy fire also experienced significant overnight growth as it burned in the Sequoia National Forest.
Potter and his colleagues investigated why firefighters are seeing more nighttime fire activity now than at the beginning of their careers. In a recent study, they found air over most of the western U.S. has become drier and warmer at night over the past 40 years, influencing the rate at which vegetation and other fuels for fire will dry out and burn.
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