Monitoring emissions from the 2015 Indonesian fires using CO satellite data

Southeast Asia, in particular Indonesia, has periodically struggled with intense fire events. These events convert substantial amounts of carbon stored as peat to atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and significantly affect atmospheric composition on a regional to global scale. During the recent 2015 El Nino event, peat fires led to strong enhancements of carbon monoxide (CO), an air pollutant and well-known tracer for biomass burning. These enhancements were clearly observed from space by the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) and the Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) instruments. We use these satellite observations to estimate CO fire emissions within an inverse modelling framework. We find that the derived CO emissions for each sub-region of Indonesia and Papua are substantially different from emission inventories, highlighting uncertainties in bottom-up estimates. CO fire emissions based on either MOPITT or IASI have a similar spatial pattern and evolution in time, and a 10% uncertainty based on a set of sensitivity tests we performed. Thus, CO satellite data have a high potential to complement existing operational fire emission estimates based on satellite observations of fire counts, fire radiative power and burned area, in better constraining fire occurrence and the associated conversion of peat carbon to atmospheric CO2. A total carbon release to the atmosphere of 0.35-0.60 Pg C can be estimated based on our results.

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Copyright 2018 Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Published by the Royal Society Published.


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Author Nechita-Banda, Narcisa
Krol, Maarten
van der Werf, Guido R.
Kaiser, Johannes W.
Pandey, Sudhanshu
Huijnen, Vincent
Clerbaux, Cathy
Coheur, Pierre
Deeter, Merritt N.
Röckmann, Thomas
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2018-11-19T00:00:00
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Not Assigned
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Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2023-08-18T19:22:34.580774
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:22047
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation Nechita-Banda, Narcisa, Krol, Maarten, van der Werf, Guido R., Kaiser, Johannes W., Pandey, Sudhanshu, Huijnen, Vincent, Clerbaux, Cathy, Coheur, Pierre, Deeter, Merritt N., Röckmann, Thomas. (2018). Monitoring emissions from the 2015 Indonesian fires using CO satellite data. UCAR/NCAR - Library. http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7154kz8. Accessed 29 March 2024.

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