Remote Sensing Data for Calibrated Assessment of Wildfire Emissions in Siberian Forests

This study was carried out for Siberia using Terra/Modis satellite data (2002–2016), data of ground surveys on burned areas of different ages, long-term meteorological information, and numerical simulation results. On the basis of meteorological and wildfire databases, we evaluated the probability (~18%) of an extreme fire danger scenario that was found to occur every 8 ± 3 years in different parts of the region. Next, we used Fire Radiative Power (FRP) measurements to classify the varieties of burning conditions for each wildfire in the database. The classification of the annually burned forest area was obtained in accordance with the assessments of burning intensity ranges categorized by FRP. Depending on the fire danger scenario in Siberia, 47.04 ± 13.6% of the total wildfire areas were classified as low-intensity burning, 42.46 ± 10.50% as medium-intensity fire areas, and 10.50 ± 6.90% as high-intensity. Next, we calculated the amount of combusted biomass and the direct emissions for each wildfire, taking into account the variable intensity of burning within the fire polygons. The total annual emissions were also calculated for Siberia for the last 15 years, from 2002 to 2016. The average estimate of direct carbon emission was 83 ± 21 Tg/year, which is lower than the result (112 ± 25 Tg/year) we obtained using the standard procedure