Fires Represent an Important Source of Carbon Emissions in Mexico

Abstract

Biomass burning, including fires, has been identified as the largest source of primary fine carbonaceous particles in the troposphere and one of the major drivers of global carbon (C) cycle, cloud properties, and climate. Most of the global C emissions happen in the Pantropic region. Modeling estimates suggest an increase in Mexican fire frequencies, intensity, and C emission to the atmosphere. However, no study has combined field and satellite data to estimate C emissions by fires for any tropical country. Here, we present an approach to estimate the spatiotemporal variability of fires and its total C emissions in Mexico with the associated climate that combines national fire inventories with remote sensing. We provide evidence that tropical ecosystems, particularly tropical forests at Yucatan Peninsula, Pacific Coast, and Gulf of Mexico, provide the largest C emissions with high fire densities. We found evidence to contrast the relationships of the interannual and intra-annual variability of C emissions with immediate and lagged climate effects such as El Niño and La Niña events. Data also indicate that C emissions from fires are up to 11 times higher than those from deforestation and account 19% of the total National CO 2 emissions and 5% of the total Pantropical C emissions. Because fires are related to climate change, we encourage future studies to focus on climate fire feedbacks for implementing adequate climate mitigation strategies.

Wildfire emissions disrupt black carbon and PM2.5 mortality burden trends across the continental US

“…Regionally, an increased number of deaths is found only in a few large cities located in the western and southern US (Fig. 2f), which may be attributed to an increase in local fire and dust emissions (20,23,39), transboundary transport from Mexico (40,41), and/or an increase in population density (Fig. S8).…”

Estimation of Sea Spray Aerosol Surface Area Over the Southern Ocean Using Scattering Measurements

“…Complementary MBL measurements were conducted during CAP-2 on the RV Investigator (voyage IN2018_V01), an Australian Government research platform operated by the Commonwealth Science and Indus-To derive a representation appropriate for marine aerosol, which is most relevant for the present study, MA used AERONET data from Ragged Point, Barbados, from 2007 to 2015, after screening for AOT 500 nm < 0.07 and total Ångström exponent (å; computed for the wavelength pair 440 and 870 nm) between 0.25 and 0.6. These criteria removed periods affected by biomass burning emissions and long-range transported dust, which are annual occurrences in the Caribbean region (Corona-Núñez et al, 2020;Prospero et al, 2014). MA derived conversion parameters for three lidar wavelengths: 355, 532, and 1,064 nm.…”

Climate and socioeconomic drivers of biomass burning and carbon emissions from fires in tropical dry forests: A Pantropical analysis

“…NDVI has been used as a proxy of the conditions of vegetations, particularly to fuel availability (Jiang et al, 2020). However, we propose to use above-ground biomass (AGB) in live plants as a fuel load proxy, similar to others (Corona-Núñez et al, 2020;Tang et al, 2021). The AGB dataset refers to the epoch of the years 2000's with a spatial resolution of 1-km (Avitabile et al, 2016).…”

“…The climatic extreme events in the TDF are an important driver of global C cycle. El Niño has been suggested as a climatic phenomenon that has impacted fire dynamics on continental (van der Werf et al, 2004) and national (Corona-Núñez et al, 2020) scales with lagged effects in the tropical forest biome (Liu et al, 2017).…”