Understanding agricultural fire dynamics in the southern Yucatán Peninsular Region using the MODIS (C6) active fire product

Abstract. Extreme wildfires are global phenomena that consistently result in loss of life and property and further impact the cultural, economic and political stability of communities. In their most severe form they cause widespread devastation of environmental assets and are capable of impacting the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere through the formation of a thunderstorm within the plume. Such fires are now often observed by a range of remote-sensing technologies, which together allow a greater understanding of a fire's complex dynamics. This paper considers one such fire that burnt in the Blue Mountains region of Australia in late November 2006, which is known to have generated significant pyrocumulonimbus clouds in a series of blow-up events. Observations of this fire are analysed in detail to investigate the localised processes contributing to extreme fire development. In particular, it has been possible to demonstrate for the first time that the most violent instances of pyroconvection were driven by, and not just associated with, atypical local fire dynamics, especially the fire channelling phenomenon, which arises due to an interaction between an active fire, local terrain attributes and critical fire weather and causes the fire to rapidly transition from a frontal to an areal burning pattern. The impacts of local variations in fire weather and of the atmospheric profile are also discussed, and the ability to predict extreme fire development with state-of-the-art tools is explored.

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Active Fire Dynamics in the Amazon: New Perspectives from High‐resolution Satellite Observations

Geophysical Research Letters ◽

10.1029/2021gl093789 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Wenxuan Xu ◽

Yongxue Liu ◽

Sander Veraverbeke ◽

Wei Wu ◽

Yanzhu Dong ◽

...

Keyword(s):

High Resolution ◽

Satellite Observations ◽

Fire Dynamics ◽

Active Fire

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Linking local wildfire dynamics to pyroCb development

Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Discussions ◽

10.5194/nhessd-2-7269-2014 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 2 (12) ◽

pp. 7269-7292

Author(s):

R. H. D. McRae ◽

J. J. Sharples ◽

M. Fromm

Keyword(s):

Blow Up ◽

Complex Dynamics ◽

Political Stability ◽

Fire Weather ◽

Fire Dynamics ◽

Cultural Economic ◽

Blue Mountains ◽

Terrain Attributes ◽

Active Fire ◽

Extreme Fire

Abstract. Extreme wildfires are global phenomena that consistently result in loss of life and property, and further impact the cultural, economic and political stability of communities. In their most extreme form they cause widespread devastation of environmental assets and are capable of impacting the upper troposphere–lower stratosphere through the formation of a thunderstorm within the plume. Such fires are now often observed by a range of remote sensing technologies, which together allow a greater understanding of a fire's complex dynamics. This paper considers one such fire that burnt in the Blue Mountains region of Australia in late-November 2006, that is known to have generated significant pyrocumulonimbus clouds in a series of blow-up events. Observations of this fire are analysed in detail to investigate the localised processes contributing to extreme fire development. In particular, it has been possible to demonstrate for the first time that the most severe instances of pyroconvection were driven by, and not just associated with, extreme local fire dynamics, especially the fire channelling phenomenon, which arises due to an interaction between an active fire, local terrain attributes and critical fire weather, and causes the fire to rapidly transition from a frontal to an areal burning pattern. The impacts of local variations in fire weather and of the atmospheric profile are also discussed, and the ability to predict extreme fire development with state-of-the-art tools is explored.

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Analysis of fire dynamics in the Brazilian savannas

10.5194/nhess-2017-90 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Guilherme Augusto Verola Mataveli ◽

Maria Elisa Siqueira Silva ◽

Gabriel Pereira ◽

Francielle da Silva Cardozo ◽

Fernando Shinji Kawakubo ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Condition Index ◽

Burned Area ◽

Spatial Correlations ◽

Fire Dynamics ◽

Burned Areas ◽

Natural Fires ◽

Active Fire ◽

Vegetation Condition ◽

Vegetation Condition Index

Abstract. Wildfires play a key role in the ecology of savannas. The Brazilian savannas (Cerrado biome), where the extension of burned areas and amount of fires can be more numerous than in the Amazon, is frequently burned due to natural fires or land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes. Thus, we aimed to understand the occurrence and the dynamics of fires in the Cerrado using active fire, burned area, precipitation, vegetation condition, estimated using the Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), and LULC data derived from orbital sensors. Results show that the Cerrado was, respectively, the second and first Brazilian biome for the occurrence of hotspots and burned area, which are concentrated during the dry season (May to September), especially in September, when the annual deficit in precipitation and extreme vegetation conditions reached maximum indices. Higher densities of hotspots concentrated in the Northern of the biome, while 75 % of the occurrences were found in the natural remnants of the Cerrado. Totals of hotspots and burned area were higher in years of lower precipitation, such as 2007 and 2010. Spatial correlations showed that hotspots and burned area are better correlated with precipitation than vegetation condition, especially in the Central North and Northeast of the Cerrado.

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Global fire activity from two years of MODIS data

International Journal of Wildland Fire ◽

10.1071/wf03078 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 14 (2) ◽

pp. 117 ◽

Cited By ~ 49

Author(s):

Ivan Csiszar ◽

Lynn Denis ◽

Louis Giglio ◽

Christopher O. Justice ◽

Jenny Hewson

Keyword(s):

Vegetation Type ◽

Order Approximation ◽

Warm Season ◽

Burned Area ◽

Global Maximum ◽

Fire Dynamics ◽

Active Fire ◽

Fire Activity ◽

Spatio Temporal ◽

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board the NASA Earth Observing System Terra and Aqua satellites provides global fire observations of unprecedented quality. This paper presents spatial and temporal distributions of active fires from 2001 and 2002, the first 2 years of the MODIS active fire data record. Monthly fire counts were analysed globally and within several regions of major fire activity and vegetation type. The global maximum of the annual cycle of fire activity for both years occurred in August; a combined result of burning during the dry season in the Southern Hemisphere tropics and the warm season over the Northern Hemisphere extratropics. The minimum of global fire activity occurred in March in both years. Burning in the tropics occurred mostly in savanna and shrubland areas with a high percentage of herbaceous vegetation. In the extratropics, fires were detected over croplands, grasslands and forests. The global total numbers of fire counts observed in 2001 and 2002 differed by less than 3%, but regionally significant differences were found between the two years in total and relative fire counts and in the timing of burning. Fire counts from daytime MODIS observations from Terra and Aqua also provided evidence of the diurnal cycle of fire activity. This analysis of ‘fire/no fire’ binary indicators is a first-order approximation of global spatio-temporal fire dynamics. For several applications, such as the estimation of pyrogenic emissions, further studies of burned area and fire characteristics are needed.

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