Continental-Scale Partitioning of Fire Emissions During the 1997 to 2001 El Niño/La Niña Period
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Open Access
- 2 January 2004
- journal article
- other
- Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Science
- Vol. 303 (5654) , 73-76
- https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1090753
Abstract
During the 1997 to 1998 El Niño, drought conditions triggered widespread increases in fire activity, releasing CH 4 and CO 2 to the atmosphere. We evaluated the contribution of fires from different continents to variability in these greenhouse gases from 1997 to 2001, using satellite-based estimates of fire activity, biogeochemical modeling, and an inverse analysis of atmospheric CO anomalies. During the 1997 to 1998 El Niño, the fire emissions anomaly was 2.1 ± 0.8 petagrams of carbon, or 66 ± 24% of the CO 2 growth rate anomaly. The main contributors were Southeast Asia (60%), Central and South America (30%), and boreal regions of Eurasia and North America (10%).Keywords
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