The Fire Inventory from NCAR (FINN): a high resolution global model to estimate the emissions from open burning. Global fire emissions estimates during 1997–2016. Emissions of trace gases from Australian temperate forest fires: emission factors and dependence on modified combustion efficiency. Inverse Problem Theory and Methods for Model Parameter Estimation (Soc. TROPOMI on the ESA Sentinel-5 precursor: a GMES mission for global observations of the atmospheric composition for climate, air quality and ozone layer applications. Six global biomass burning emission datasets: intercomparison and application in one global aerosol model. Estimating greenhouse gas emissions from bushfires in Australia’s temperate forests: focus on 2019–20.
(last accessed 23 July 2021) (2019).Īustralian Government Technical Update 2020. Nature 584, 188–191 (2020).Īustralian Government Annual Climate Statement 2019. Wildfires: Australia needs national monitoring agency. This is because the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide may become increasingly dependent on fire-driven climate–carbon feedbacks, as highlighted by this event 16.īowman, D. The fires were driven partly by climate change 14, 15, making better-constrained emission estimates particularly important. Although fires occur regularly in the savannas in northern Australia, the recent episodes were extremely large in scale and intensity, burning unusually large areas of eucalyptus forest in the southeast 13. This is more than twice the estimate derived by five different fire inventories 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and broadly consistent with estimates based on a bottom-up bootstrap analysis of this fire episode 13. We estimate emissions of carbon dioxide to be 715 teragrams (range 517–867) from November 2019 to January 2020. Here we constrain emission estimates with the help of satellite observations of carbon monoxide 5, an analytical Bayesian inversion 6 and observed ratios between emitted carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide 7. However, existing emission estimates based on fire inventories are uncertain 4, and vary by up to a factor of four for this event. The fires released substantial amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere 3. Southeast Australia experienced intensive and geographically extensive wildfires during the 2019–2020 summer season 1, 2.