Indonesian fire activity and smoke pollution in 2015 show persistent nonlinear sensitivity to El Niño-induced drought

Field, Robert D.; Werf, Guido R. van der; Fanin, Thierry; Fetzer, Eric J.; Fuller, R. A.; Jethva, Hiren; Levy, Robert C.; Livesey, N. J.; Luo, Ming; Torres, Omar; Worden, H. M.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1524888113

Cited by 317 publications

(316 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…This has shown to be the case for peat fires in Indonesia [ Heil and Goldammer , 2001; Field et al ., 2009, 2016]. The fire regime in Indonesia is strongly linked to anthropogenic use of fire for deforestation and peatland cultivation and rainfall patterns.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fire and deforestation dynamics in Amazonia (1973–2014)

Marle

Field

Werf

et al. 2017

Global Biogeochemical Cycles

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Consistent long‐term estimates of fire emissions are important to understand the changing role of fire in the global carbon cycle and to assess the relative importance of humans and climate in shaping fire regimes. However, there is limited information on fire emissions from before the satellite era. We show that in the Amazon region, including the Arc of Deforestation and Bolivia, visibility observations derived from weather stations could explain 61% of the variability in satellite‐based estimates of bottom‐up fire emissions since 1997 and 42% of the variability in satellite‐based estimates of total column carbon monoxide concentrations since 2001. This enabled us to reconstruct the fire history of this region since 1973 when visibility information became available. Our estimates indicate that until 1987 relatively few fires occurred in this region and that fire emissions increased rapidly over the 1990s. We found that this pattern agreed reasonably well with forest loss data sets, indicating that although natural fires may occur here, deforestation and degradation were the main cause of fires. Compared to fire emissions estimates based on Food and Agricultural Organization's Global Forest and Resources Assessment data, our estimates were substantially lower up to the 1990s, after which they were more in line. These visibility‐based fire emissions data set can help constrain dynamic global vegetation models and atmospheric models with a better representation of the complex fire regime in this region.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fire and deforestation dynamics in Amazonia (1973–2014)

Marle

Field

Werf

et al. 2017

Global Biogeochemical Cycles

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“…In recent years, research on tropical droughts has received substantial attention from researchers and policy makers due to the awareness on climate change [3][4][5][6]. For instance, occurrences of the 2010 Amazon drought [7], the 1997-1998 Malaysia drought [8], the 2015 Indonesia drought [9] and the 2012 Northeast Brazil drought [10] have turned the tropical forest from a net carbon sink to a source, thus impacting local communities and ecosystems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluation of TRMM Product for Monitoring Drought in the Kelantan River Basin, Malaysia

Tan

Chua

et al. 2017

Water

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Assessment of satellite precipitation products' capability for monitoring drought is relatively new in tropical regions. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the reliability of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) 3B43 product in estimating the standardized precipitation index (SPI) in the Kelantan River Basin, Malaysia from 1998 to 2014, by comparing it with data from 42 rain gauges. Overall, the TMPA-3B43 performed well in the monthly precipitation estimation, but performed moderately in the seasonal scale. Better performance was found in the northeast monsoon (wet season) than in the southwest monsoon (dry season). The product is more reliable in the northern and north-eastern regions (coastal zone) compared to the central, southern and south-eastern regions (mountainous area). For drought assessment, the correlations between the TMPA-3B43 and ground observations are moderate at various time-scales (one to twelve months), with better performance at shorter time-scales. The TMPA-3B43 shows similar temporal drought behavior by capturing most of the drought events at various time-scales, except for the 2008-2009 drought. These findings show that the TMPA-3B43 is not suitable to be used directly for SPI estimation in this basin. More bias correction and algorithm improvement work are needed to improve the accuracy of the TMPA-3B43 in drought monitoring.

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“…Fire emissions from Asian tropical regions also show a nonlinear increase with drought during El Niño, another factor that reduces land carbon sequestration (Field et al, 2016;Yin et al, 2016). With future anthropogenic climate change, it is projected that the frequency of extreme El Niño events will be doubled (Cai et al, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vegetation greenness and land carbon-flux anomalies associated with climate variations: a focus on the year 2015

Ciais

Bastos

et al. 2017

Atmos. Chem. Phys.

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Abstract. Understanding the variations in global land carbon uptake, and their driving mechanisms, is essential if we are to predict future carbon-cycle feedbacks on global environmental changes. Satellite observations of vegetation greenness have shown consistent greening across the globe over the past three decades. Such greening has driven the increasing land carbon sink, especially over the growing season in northern latitudes. On the other hand, interannual variations in land carbon uptake are strongly influenced by El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate variations. Marked reductions in land uptake and strong positive anomalies in the atmospheric CO 2 growth rates occur during El Niño events. Here we use the year 2015 as a natural experiment to examine the possible response of land ecosystems to a combination of vegetation greening and an El Niño event. The year 2015 was the greenest year since 2000 according to satellite observations, but a record atmospheric CO 2 growth rate also occurred due to a weaker than usual land carbon sink. Two atmospheric inversions indicate that the year 2015 had a higher than usual northern land carbon uptake in boreal spring and summer, consistent with the positive greening anomaly and strong warming. This strong uptake was, however, followed by a larger source of CO 2 in the autumn. For the year 2015, enhanced autumn carbon release clearly offset the extra uptake associated with greening during the summer. This finding leads us to speculate that a long-term greening trend may foster more uptakes during the growing season, but no large increase in annual carbon sequestration. For the tropics and Southern Hemisphere, a strong transition towards a large carbon source for the last 3 months of 2015 is discovered, concomitant with El Niño development. This transition of terrestrial tropical CO 2 fluxes between two consecutive seasons is the largest ever found in the inversion records. The strong transition to a carbon source in the tropics with the peak of El Niño is consistent with historical observations, but the detailed mechanisms underlying such an extreme transition remain to be elucidated.

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Indonesian fire activity and smoke pollution in 2015 show persistent nonlinear sensitivity to El Niño-induced drought

Cited by 317 publications

References 52 publications

Fire and deforestation dynamics in Amazonia (1973–2014)

Fire and deforestation dynamics in Amazonia (1973–2014)

Evaluation of TRMM Product for Monitoring Drought in the Kelantan River Basin, Malaysia

Vegetation greenness and land carbon-flux anomalies associated with climate variations: a focus on the year 2015

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