Contemporary Climate-Fire Feedbacks and the Potential Amplification of Future Fire Emissions
Abstract
Positive feedbacks between climate change and vegetation disturbances such as fire may accelerate carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere. A process-level understanding of the linkages between climate change and fire behavior is therefore fundamental to improve the predictability of fire feedbacks over a range of time scales. Here, we use two new datasets to bound the magnitude of fire carbon emissions and evaluate the strength of fire-climate feedbacks under current climate conditions. First, we analyze the most recent release of the Global Fire Emissions Database to quantify recent trends in burned area and the magnitude of fire carbon emissions over the past 25 years. Quantifying total fire carbon emissions and the fire fraction of net carbon dioxide emissions is critical to appropriately scale the impact of future changes in fire activity. Next, we explore the degree to which fires are predictable in the short term, a key test of the mechanisms that contribute to potential climate-fire feedbacks on longer time horizons. This analysis leverages new data products that track sub-daily fire behavior based on active fire detections from the VIIRS sensors onboard the Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20 satellites. Fire tracking provides insight into the drivers of episodic fire spread in tropical, temperate, and boreal ecosystems and extreme fire behavior. Finally, we explore the potential for climate change to amplify the feedback from fires to greenhouse gas emissions based on the specific climate metrics that contribute to regional extremes in fire behavior. Together, these lines of evidence point to a fierier future, with increases in carbon emissions from an intensification of fire regimes in forests and woodlands with abundant fuels.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFM.B45A..05M