Investigation of Biomass Combustion Rate of Fire Radiative Energy Using Multiple-Satellite-observed Active Fires and Landsat TM Burn Severities across the Continental United States

Abstract:

Biomass burning is a major source of atmospheric aerosol and greenhouse gases that substantially influence climate and regional air quality. However, the accuracy of biomass burning emissions estimated using traditional method is limited by large uncertainties in burned area and fuel loading. Alternatively, fire radiative energy (FRE) has recently been demonstrated to be linearly related to biomass combustion, which potentially improves the estimation of biomass burning emissions. The FRE-based combustion rate is 0.368-0.453 kg/MJ according to field controlled experiments while it varies from 1.37-4.5 kg/MJ derived from satellite-based bottom-up and top-down aerosol optical thickness estimates. Here we investigate the FRE combustion rate in over 1000 burn scars from 2011 to 2012 across the Continental United States (CONUS). Specifically, FRE was calculated by combining the high spatial observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the high temporal observations from the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES). Biomass consumption in burn scars was modeled using Landsat TM 30m burn severities, 30m fuel loading from Fuel Characteristic Classification System, and combustion completeness compiled from recent literatures. The combustion rate was then investigated by correlating FRE to biomass consumption across CONUS and Bailey’s ecoregions. Our results show that the combustion rate can be extracted from the linear relationship between biomass consumption and FRE. The combustion rate is 0.415±10% kg/MJ across CONUS, which is similar to the rate derived from field experiments. However, it varies from 0.18-1.9 kg/MJ among ecoregions. This implies that a single combustion rate could produce large uncertainty in the estimation of biomass consumption at large scales. We suggest that ecoregion specified combustion rates should help to improve the accuracy of quantifying biomass burning emissions regionally and globally.