The D-FIRE sub-project provides global emissions from biomass burning to the other MACC services and to the general public. The emissions are calculated in real time and retrospectively from satellite-based observations of open fires (for example wildfires and human-ignited grassland and forest fires).

Latest Observed Fire Distribution

!!!NEW!!! Global combustion rate for the last ten days in KML/KMZ format, to be viewed in Google Earth !!!NEW!!!
You may want to overlay the KML with the latest MODIS hot spot locations provided by the University of Maryland.

Global emission rates of various species can be downloaded in NetCDF format from the MACC Server at FZ Juelich.

The map represents the thermal radiation measured from space-borne sensors and detected as coming from actively burning vegetation and other open fires. It is expressed as the daily average of the fire radiative power (FRP) observations made in 125 km grid cells and expressed in the units of [mW/m²]. The rate of release of thermal radiation by a fire is believed to be related to the rate at which fuel is being consumed and smoke produced. Therefore, these daily averaged FRP areal intensity data are used in the global estimation of open vegetation fire trace gas and particulate emissions, which are passed onto the other MACC services for incorporation as model source terms. The data are derived from FRP observations by the SEVIRI and MODIS instruments, which are provided by the EUMETSAT LSA SAF and NASA, respectively. Earlier maps are also available for the past 365 days.

Latest Smoke Distribution Forecasts

• Organic matter, black carbon and sulfate aerosols are emitted from fires and other, mostly anthropogenic, sources. They are called "anthropogenic aerosols" in MACC and the latest forecast of their aerosol optical depth (AOD), including emissions derived from the latest observed fire distribution and assimilation of space-borne AOD observations, is available HERE.
• Forecasts of a carbon monoxide-like tracer that are solely due to the emissions by the latest observed fires are available HERE. We recommend to use the concentration at 925hPa because the surface fields may suffer from spuriously large values at the locations of the fires, which still originate from neglecting the smoke plume rise.

Fire Products

• Our pre-operational products are available from the Fire Emission Service web page.
• The GFED data are available here.
• Custom products created following individual user requests are available on a dedicated web page.
• All fire products in the MARS archive at ECMWF are listed on this web page.
• If you cannot find what you are looking for, please contact us.
  

Highlight: Greek and Algerian Fires in August 2007

The upper panel shows the fire intensity observed by the SEVIRI instrument in terms of fire radiative power (FRP per unit area at 25 km resolution, reddish color bar) and the optical depth of the simulated resulting smoke aerosols (AOD, bluish color bar). The lower panel shows a preliminary estimate of the surface PM2.5 concentration due to the fires, which has been derived from the aerosol simulation. The simulation has been performed with the global aerosol model at a horizontal resolution of about 25 km. Adapted from Kaiser et al. (2009c/d). Click on the image to play the animation if you have got a Quicktime or mplayer plug-in.

The Team

• Angelika Heil, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany
• Guido van der Werf, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Johannes Kaiser, ECMWF (lead)
• Martin Schultz, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany
• Martin Wooster, King's College London, UK
• Weidong Xu, King's College London, UK

Recent Publications and Presentations

• Kaiser, J. W., Heil, A., Andreae, M. O., Benedetti, A., Chubarova, N., Jones, L., Morcrette, J.-J., Razinger, M., Schultz, M. G., Suttie, M., and van der Werf, G. R. (2012). Biomass burning emissions estimated with a global fire assimilation system based on observed fire radiative power. BG, 9:527-554. [PDF]
• Xu et al. (2010) New GOES imager algorithms for cloud and active fire detection and fire radiative power assessment across North, South and Central America. RSE Vol. 114 [PDF]
• Heil et al. (2010) Assessment of the Real-Time Fire Emissions (GFASv0) by MACC, ECMWF Tech. Memo No. 628 [PDF]

External Links

• GMAI, CPTEC/INPE, Brazil
• FLAMBE, NRL, USA
• EFFIS, JRC, EU
• GFMC, MPI Chemistry, Germany
• also see ESF Exploratory Workshop on Fires, September 2009, Farnham Castle

Contact

Johannes Kaiser: j.kaiser@ecmwf.int