(h/t GWPF) The control of fire is a goal that may well be as old as humanity, but the systematic monitoring of fire on a global scale is a much newer capability.
In the 1910s, the U.S. Forest Service began building fire lookout towers on mountain peaks in order to detect distant fires. A few decades later, fire-spotting airplanes flew onto the scene.
Then in the early 1980s, satellites began to map fires over large areas from the vantage point of space.
Over time, researchers have built a rich and textured record of Earth’s fire activity and are now able to analyze decadal trends.
“The pace of discovery has increased dramatically during the satellite era,” said James Randerson, a scientist at the University of California, Irvine. “Having high-quality, daily observations of fires available on a global scale has been critical.”
The animation above shows the locations of actively burning fires on a monthly basis for nearly two decades.
The maps are based on observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.
The colors are based on a count of the number (not size) of fires observed within a 1,000-square-kilometer area.
White pixels show the high end of the count—as many as 30 fires in a 1,000-square-kilometer area per day. Orange pixels show as many as 10 fires, while red areas show as few as 1 fire per day.
The sequence highlights the rhythms—both natural and human-caused—in global fire activity. Bands of fire sweep across Eurasia, North America, and Southeast Asia as farmers clear and maintain fields in April and May.
Summer brings new activity in boreal and temperate forests in North America and Eurasia due to lighting-triggered fires burning in remote areas.
In the tropical forests of South America and equatorial Asia, fires flare up in August, September, and October as people make use of the dry season to clear rainforest and savanna, as well as stop trees and shrubs from encroaching on already cleared land.
Few months pass in Australia without large numbers of fires burning somewhere on the continent’s vast grasslands, savannas, and tropical forests.
But it is Africa that is truly the fire continent. On an average day in August, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites detect 10,000 actively burning fires around the world—and 70 percent them happen in Africa.
Huge numbers of blazes spring up in the northern part of the continent in December and January.
A half-year later, the burning has shifted south. Indeed, global fire emissions typically peak in August and September, coinciding with the main fire seasons of the Southern Hemisphere, particularly Africa. (High activity in temperate and boreal forests in the Northern Hemisphere in the summer also contribute.)
The second animation underscores how much fire activity shifts seasonally by highlighting burning activity during December 2014, April 2015, and August 2015.
Though Africa dominates in the sheer number of fires, fires seasons there are pretty consistent from year-to-year.
The most variable fire seasons happen elsewhere, such as the tropical forests of South America and equatorial Asia. In these areas, the severity of fire season is often linked to cycles of El Niño and La Niña.
The buildup of warm water in the eastern Pacific during an El Niño changes atmospheric patterns and reduces rainfall over many rainforests, allowing them to burn more easily and widely.
Despite the vast quantities of carbon released by fires in savannas, grasslands, and boreal forests, research shows that fires in these biomes do not generally add carbon to the atmosphere in the long term.
The regrowth of vegetation or the creation of charcoal typically recaptures all of the carbon within months or years.
One of the most interesting things researchers have discovered since MODIS began collecting measurements, noted Randerson, is a decrease in the total number of square kilometers burned each year.
Between 2003 and 2019, that number has dropped by roughly 25 percent.
Read rest at Earth Observatory NASA
Forest fires are down in California because the bums that start them are too busy crapping on the sidewalks in San Francisco .
Since most of California has become a tinder box because a bunch of Eco-Freaks have sued to stop all logging and logging is limited then maybe instead of all those fire fighters risking their lives lets put al those idiot Tree Huggers and Eco-Wackos on these fires let them learn some responibility for their acts of stupidity their burning up the habitats for their Marbled Murrlets and Spotted Owls with their Let it burn ideology
But, but, but, none of this can be true! I heard from Ronaldo and Madonna that the lungs of the planet are on fire and we may be at a tipping point due to the fires in the Amazon! Except they didn’t mention Africa or Australia or… Nor did they mention that this fire season in the US is much lower than last year’s. Wonder why.