Project Funding: 2008 - 2011

NRA: 2006 NASA: EOS   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
Feedbacks involving fire and drought are likely to have important consequences for future levels of greenhouse gases, climate, and forest ecosystems. Here we propose an Integrated Science Data Analysis project to quantify global fire emissions and their impact on the carbon cycle. The proposed project builds on our previous work to develop the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED) and distribute it to the Earth System Science community. The GFED product currently provides estimates of burned area and fire emissions from 1997 through 2005 at a 1 degree by 1 degree spatial resolution and with a monthly time step. A primary goal of our proposed work is to develop a 13-year record of fire emissions (1997-2009) that captures variability introduced by ENSO cycles and human activity. MODIS observations will play a central role in the development of our fire emissions estimates. MOPITT and OCO observations will provide important top-down constraints on regional budgets. With a 0.5 degree by 0.5 degree spatial resolution, our proposed time series will improve the Earth System Science community’s ability to understand variations in atmospheric chemistry, aerosols, and the carbon cycle. As a part of our proposed work effort, we will partition burned area and fire emissions into four land use classes associated with deforestation, pasture maintenance, agricultural waste burning, and wildfire. We also plan to make improvements in the way we derive burned area, in the representation of tropical aboveground biomass levels and peatlands, and in the use of MOPITT CO as an atmospheric constraint on regional fire emissions budgets. These products will be publicly-available and distributed through the ORNL-DAAC and the PIs web-site. Our science objectives are to analyze this fire emissions time series in combination with MOPITT and OCO observations to improve our understanding of the tropical carbon cycle. MOPITT CO inversions will be used to constrain interannual variability in fire emissions associated with deforestation. By using OCO column CO2 observations, we plan to partition tropical ecosystem fluxes into fire and net ecosystem production (NEP) components. This analysis will improve our understanding of the impact of variations in soil moisture on tropical ecosystem carbon fluxes. Achieving these science objectives will enable us to quantify the degree to which humans have changed the magnitude of contemporary interannual CO2 variability (and possibly the sign of its response to El Nino). Our proposed study will strengthen U.S. contributions to climate science. It also will promote U.S. scientific leadership by providing substantial support for the training of graduate students, undergraduate students, and recent Ph.D.s. This work will specifically contribute to the training of three graduate students, including one at Duke University, one at University of Maryland, and one at University of California, Irvine.

2013 NASA Terrestrial Ecology Science Team Meeting Poster(s)

• Satellite-based differences in fire regimes between boreal North America and Eurasia   --   (Brendan M. Rogers, James T. Randerson, Amber Soja)   [abstract]

2011 NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Joint Science Workshop Poster(s)

• Long-term trends of agricultural fires in the U.S. derived from MODIS observations: implications for fire emissions   --   (Hsiao-Wen Lin, Yufang Jin, Giglio Louis, James Randerson)   [abstract]

2010 NASA Terrestrial Ecology Science Team Meeting Poster(s)

• Evaluating UNFCCC reporting systems for agricultural fires using MODIS active fires   --   (Hsiao-Wen Lin, Yufang Jin, Louis Giglo, Jonathan A. Foley, James T. Randerson)   [abstract]
• Fire contributions to global carbon and nitrogen cycles   --   (James T. Randerson)   [abstract]
• Revising estimates of global GPP using new information from eddy covariance and satellite datasets   --   (Yi Wang, Yufang Jin, Michael L Goulden, James T Randerson)   [abstract]

2008 NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Joint Science Workshop Posters

• Modeling carbon emissions from multiple land use transitions in southern Amazonia   --   (Douglas C Morton, Ruth S DeFries, Guido R van der Werf, James T Randerson, Louis Giglio, James Collatz, Prasad S Kasibhatla, Victor H Gutierrez)   [abstract]

More details may be found in the following project profile(s):

• NASA Terrestrial Ecology (TE) Project Profile