A Look Back at a Decade of Fires

Watch nearly a decade of burning from a satellite's perspective. Seventy percent of land charred by fire each year occurs in Africa. Australia sees about 14 percent of the world's burning and Asia 8 percent. University of Maryland scientist Chris Justice points out that some fires help sustain healthy ecosystems. Droughts fueled deadly fires in southeastern Australia in 2009. The brightest fires are shown in yellow, dimmer fires in red. Despite intense burning seasons, African fires leave little carbon in the air because of all the carbon fast-recovering vegetation recycles. Fires in equatorial Asia, in contrast, leave large amounts of carbon in the air because of the carbon-rich peat soils that often burn. While burning in Africa tends to be consistent from year to year, fire activity in the boreal forests of Asia is sporadic. Regulations have slowed clear-cutting of the Amazon forest, but fire activity has still gone up in many areas due to agricultural activity. Despite increases in large wildfires in the American West, only about 2 percent of the land burned in the last decade has occured in North America. What do nearly ten years of satellite fire observations look like? Instruments on two NASA Earth-observing satellites have answered that question by scanning the surface for signs of fire four times a day since 2002. The instruments have generated an ever-growing string of data that researchers have used to map the distribution of the world's fires in unprecedented detail. The visualization below provides a global tour of these observations using red to indicate actively burning fires, green to show vegetation and white to show snow. It begins with heavy grassland fires that speckle the dry interior of Australia in 2002. The view then pans to Asia and fire-prone Africa where waves of agricultural and management fires sweep across large portions of these continents in sync with seasonal surges of vegetation and retreating snow. A glimpse of a mild South American fire season in 2009 follows, along with intermittent flashes from wildfires that ravaged areas of Texas in the spring of 2011. Such data has more than aesthetic value: scientists use it to track fire trends over time and to refine calculations that show how greenhouse gases and particles emitted by fires in different regions contribute to climate change. Related pages

Fire observations from around the world taken over nearly 10 years are shown in this visualization of NASA satellite data.For complete transcript, click here.This video is also available on our YouTube channel. A 10 year sequence of global fires as seen by NASA's MODIS instruments. Colortable showing MODIS fire pixels. The number colorized is MODIS MCD14ML T21 Brightness temperature minus the T31 Brightness temperature. Colortable showing MODIS' 16 Day Composite NDVI Australia on December 15, 2002. Asia and Europe on September 15, 2004 South America on September 15, 2009 The United States on July 15, 2011. This frame set is designed for the Science On a Sphere venues. It contains global fire and vegetation data from July 1, 2002 through July 30, 2011. Hyperwall files This visualization leads viewers on a narrated global tour of fire detections beginning in July 2002 and ending July 2011. The visualization also includes vegetation and snow cover data to show how fires respond to seasonal changes. The tour begins in Australia in 2002 by showing a network of massive grassland fires spreading across interior Australia as well as the greener Eucalyptus forests in the northern and eastern part of the continent. The tour then shifts to Asia where large numbers of agricultural fires are visible first in China in June 2004, then across a huge swath of Europe and western Russia in August, and then across India and Southeast Asia through the early part of 2005. It moves next to Africa, the continent that has more abundant burning than any other. MODIS observations have shown that some 70 percent of the world's fires occur in Africa alone. In what's a fairly average burning season, the visualization shows a huge outbreak of savanna fires during the dry season in Central Africa in July, August, and September of 2006, driven mainly by agricultural activities but also by the fact that the region experiences more lightning than anywhere else in the world. The tour shifts next to South America where a steady flickering of fire is visible across much of the Amazon rainforest with peaks of activity in September and November of 2009. Almost all of the fires in the Amazon are the direct result of human activity, including slash-and-burn agriculture, because the high moisture levels in the region prevent inhibit natural fires from occurring. It concludes in North America, a region where fires are comparatively rare. North American fires make up just 2 percent of the world's burned area each year. The fires that receive the most attention in the United States, the uncontrolled forest fires in the West, are less visible than the wave of agricultural fires prominent in the Southeast and along the Mississippi River Valley, but some of the large wildfires that struck Texas earlier this spring are visible. More information on the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) is available at http://maps.geog.umd.edu/firms/. Related pages