scholarly journals New eastern China agricultural burning fire emission inventory and trends analysis from combined geostationary (Himawari-8) and polar-orbiting (VIIRS-IM) fire radiative power products

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianran Zhang ◽  
Mark C. de Jong ◽  
Martin J. Wooster ◽  
Weidong Xu ◽  
Lili Wang

Abstract. Open burning of agricultural crop residues is widespread across eastern China, and during certain post-harvest periods this activity is believed to significantly influence air quality. However, the exact contribution of crop residue burning to major air quality exceedances and air quality episodes has proven difficult to quantify. Whilst highly successful in many regions, in areas dominated by agricultural burning MODIS-based fire emissions inventories such as GFAS and GFED are suspected of significantly underestimating the magnitude of biomass burning emissions due to the typically very small, but highly numerous, fires involved that are quite easily missed by coarser spatial resolution remote sensing observations. To address this issue, we here use twice daily fire radiative power (FRP) observations from the ‘small fire optimised’ VIIRS-IM FRP product, and combine it with fire diurnal cycle information taken from the geostationary Himawari-8 satellite. Using this we generate a unique high spatio-temporal resolution agricultural burning inventory for eastern China for the years 2012–2015, designed to fully take into account small fires well below the MODIS burned area or active fire detection limit, focusing on dry matter burned (DMB) and emissions of CO2, CO, PM2.5 and black carbon. We calculate DMB totals 100 to 400 % higher than reported by GFAS and GFED4.1s, and quantify interesting spatial and temporal patterns previously un-noted. Wheat residue burning, primarily occurring in May–June, is responsible for more than half of the annual crop residue burning emissions of all species, whilst a secondary peak in autumn (Sept–Oct) is associated with rice and corn residue burning. We further identify a new winter (Nov–Dec) burning season, hypothesised to be caused by delays in burning driven by the stronger implementation of residue burning bans during the autumn post-harvest season. Whilst our emissions estimates are far higher than those of other satellite-based emissions inventories for the region, they are lower than estimates made using traditional ‘crop yield-based approaches’ (CYBA) by a factor of between 2 and 5 x. We believe that this is at least in part caused by outdated and overly high burning ratios being used in the CYBA approach, leading to the overestimation of DMB. Therefore we conclude that that satellite remote sensing approaches which adequately detect the presence of agricultural fires are a far better approach to agricultural fire emission estimation.

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (17) ◽  
pp. 10687-10705
Author(s):  
Tianran Zhang ◽  
Mark C. de Jong ◽  
Martin J. Wooster ◽  
Weidong Xu ◽  
Lili Wang

Abstract. Open burning of agricultural crop residues is widespread across eastern China, and during certain post-harvest periods this activity is believed to significantly influence air quality. However, the exact contribution of crop residue burning to major air quality exceedances and air quality episodes has proven difficult to quantify. Whilst highly successful in many regions, in areas dominated by agricultural burning, MODIS-based (MODIS: Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) fire emissions inventories such as the Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) and Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED) are suspected of significantly underestimating the magnitude of biomass burning emissions due to the typically very small, but highly numerous, fires involved that are quite easily missed by coarser-spatial-resolution remote sensing observations. To address this issue, we use twice-daily fire radiative power (FRP) observations from the “small-fire-optimised” VIIRS-IM FRP product and combine them with fire diurnal cycle information taken from the geostationary Himawari-8 satellite. Using this we generate a unique high-spatio-temporal-resolution agricultural burning inventory for eastern China for the years 2012–2015, designed to fully take into account small fires well below the MODIS burned area or active fire detection limit, focusing on dry matter burned (DMB) and emissions of CO2, CO, PM2.5, and black carbon. We calculate DMB totals 100 % to 400 % higher than reported by the GFAS and GFED4.1s, and we quantify interesting spatial and temporal patterns previously un-noted. Wheat residue burning, primarily occurring in May–June, is responsible for more than half of the annual crop residue burning emissions of all species, whilst a secondary peak in autumn (September–October) is associated with rice and corn residue burning. We further identify a new winter (November–December) burning season, hypothesised to be caused by delays in burning driven by the stronger implementation of residue burning bans during the autumn post-harvest season. Whilst our emissions estimates are far higher than those of other satellite-based emissions inventories for the region, they are lower than estimates made using traditional “crop-yield-based approaches” (CYBAs) by a factor of between 2 and 5. We believe that this is at least in part caused by outdated and overly high burning ratios being used in the CYBA, leading to the overestimation of DMB. Therefore, we conclude that satellite remote sensing approaches which adequately detect the presence of agricultural fires are a far better approach to agricultural fire emission estimation.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaohui Zhang ◽  
Yan Lu ◽  
Qin'geng Wang ◽  
Xin Qian

Abstract. Crop residue burning is an important source of air pollutants and strongly affects the regional air quality and global climate change. This study presents a detailed emission inventory of major air pollutants from crop residue burning for the year of 2014 in China. Activity data were investigated for 296 prefecture-level cities, and emissions were firstly estimated for each city and then redistributed using 1-km resolution land use data. Temporal variation was determined according to the farming practice in different regions. The MODIS fire product was applied to verify the spatial and temporal variations of the inventory. Results indicates that the total emissions of BC, OC, PM2.5, PM10, SO2, NOX, NH3, CH4, NMVOC, CO and CO2 from crop residue burning (including open and household fuel burnings) were estimated to be 0.16, 0.82, 2.30, 2.66, 0.09, 0.70, 0.14, 0.81, 1.70, 13.70 and 309.04 Tg, respectively. Rice, wheat and corn were the three major contributors, but their relative contributions varied with region and season. High emissions were generally located in the eastern China, central China and northeastern China, and temporally peaking in June and October relating with harvesting time. The spatially and temporal distributions agree well with the fire pixel counts from MODIS. Uncertainties were estimated using the Monte Carlo method. This study provides a useful basis for air quality modeling and the policy making of pollution control strategies.


Heliyon ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. e06973
Author(s):  
Pallavi Saxena ◽  
Saurabh Sonwani ◽  
Ananya Srivastava ◽  
Madhavi Jain ◽  
Anju Srivastava ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (8) ◽  
pp. 4790-4799 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santosh H. Kulkarni ◽  
Sachin D. Ghude ◽  
Chinmay Jena ◽  
Rama K. Karumuri ◽  
Baerbel Sinha ◽  
...  

Eos ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 95 (37) ◽  
pp. 333-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramesh P. Singh ◽  
Dimitris G. Kaskaoutis

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (24) ◽  
pp. 7075
Author(s):  
Daniel Fisher ◽  
Martin J. Wooster ◽  
Weidong Xu ◽  
Gareth Thomas ◽  
Puji Lestari

Extreme fires in the peatlands of South East (SE) Asia are arguably the world’s greatest biomass burning events, resulting in some of the worst ambient air pollution ever recorded (PM10 > 3000 µg·m−3). The worst of these fires coincide with El Niño related droughts, and include huge areas of smouldering combustion that can persist for months. However, areas of flaming surface vegetation combustion atop peat are also seen, and we show that the largest of these latter fires appear to be the most radiant and intensely smoke-emitting areas of combustion present in such extreme fire episodes. Fire emissions inventories and early warning of the air quality impacts of landscape fire are increasingly based on the fire radiative power (FRP) approach to fire emissions estimation, including for these SE Asia peatland fires. “Top-down” methods estimate total particulate matter emissions directly from FRP observations using so-called “smoke emission coefficients” [Ce; g·MJ−1], but currently no discrimination is made between fire types during such calculations. We show that for a subset of some of the most thermally radiant peatland fires seen during the 2015 El Niño, the most appropriate Ce is around a factor of three lower than currently assumed (~16.8 ± 1.6 g·MJ−1 vs. 52.4 g·MJ−1). Analysis indicates that this difference stems from these highly radiant fires containing areas of substantial flaming combustion, which changes the amount of particulate matter emitted per unit of observable fire radiative heat release in comparison to more smouldering dominated events. We also show that even a single one of these most radiant fires is responsible for almost 10% of the overall particulate matter released during the 2015 fire event, highlighting the importance of this fire type to overall emission totals. Discriminating these different fires types in ways demonstrated herein should thus ultimately improve the accuracy of SE Asian fire emissions estimates derived using the FRP approach, and the air quality modelling which they support.


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