Fire Forecasts July-September 2022

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Author: Kátia Fernandes

Fires in the Amazon are the result of human activities, including the use of fire for deforestation, land clearing and agricultural maintenance. Most fires begin in non-forest areas that have already been cleared for agricultural use, but these fires can spread into neighboring forests and burn through the understory. Even these low-intensity surface fires kill most trees since Amazon forests have not adapted to fire. Fires in the Amazon are the result of human activities that (usually) begin with slash and burn practices to clear the land for to establish agro-pastoral activities. For the most part, fires occur over non-forest landscapes, but they can spill over into standing forest edges and burn the understory.

Drivers of fire ignition during the dry season depend on factors such as land-use practices, market demands, existence and enforcement of environmental laws, and the prevalent climate. Assuming that the anthropogenic drivers are similar from year to year, unintended fire spread depends on whether the dry season is unusually dry or wet. Predicting how intense the fire season will be is essential for prevention planning. Fire activity as a function of climate can be determined based on the 20 plus years of continued active fire measurements from satellite and climate variables, which are available from observations and seasonal climate forecasts from General Circulation Models.

The seasonal fire forecast presented below follows a statistical model (Fernandes et al., 2011) that uses sea surface temperature (SST) forecasts from early as March to predict July-September (JAS) fire season anomalies. The forecast is updated monthly through June and the closer the forecast is from the July-September fire season, the more robust the outlook. Anomalously warm SSTs in the north tropical Atlantic (NTA) shift patterns of precipitation northward reducing moisture inflow into the Amazon and drought follows. Thus, it expected that a warmer NTA will translate into a more active fire season, whereas a cooler NTA will result in milder (below average) fire activity (Fig. 1).

The NTA index is then used to predict JAS fire anomalies in southern and western Amazon. The June forecast of the July-September (JAS) north tropical Atlantic index indicates warmer than average NTA in JAS 2022 (Fig.1) which is expected to result in a mildly active fire season predicted for western Amazon in JAS. The light pink shades in Fig. indicate slightly above average activity being the predominant pattern of the 2022 forecast. Gaps in the map represent areas with no fires or with poor relationship to the NTA index.

The statistical   fireforecast model   by Chen et al. (2011), shows similar results pointing to near normal fire activity predicted for the dry season (as seen in Fig. 3), except for Santa Cruz in Bolívia, where the latest forecast points to an above normal fire season.

It is important to keep in mind that the climate determines only part of the variability of the fire season. In the absence of human activities, fires would be inexistent in the Amazon rainforest biome even in dry years, while a concentrated effort to burn will likely result in more fires than usual in years with normal precipitation. Nonetheless, fire prediction based on seasonal climate forecast can provide an advanced view of the background climate condition, that may favor (droughts), or inhibit (rainy) widespread fires.

Similar to our current 2022 forecast, the 2021  fireforecast  pointed to a mildly active fire season in the southern and western sector of the Amazon.

The north tropical Atlantic index forecast in June 2021, indicated the potential for average, or slightly below average precipitation from July to September. The observed precipitation pattern (shown in Fig. 4b as the Standardized Precipitation Index - SPI)), describes drought conditions in southwestern Amazon (such as the Brazilian states of Acre and southern Amazonas), where anomalously active fire occurrence (Fig. 4a) was also observed. But the overall precipitation pattern in southern Amazon describes normal (marked as white in Fig. 4b) to above-normal precipitation (shaded in green in Fig. 4b), which helped tamper fire activity in northern Mato Grosso, Tocantins and southern Pará (shaded green in Fig. 4a).

SERVIR-Amazonia is working on various fronts to improve the robustness of seasonal fire forecasts as well as visualization tools that will allow interactive mapping. In addition, meetings are being planned to inform stakeholders and potentially allow for early preventive measures in the region.

The predicted near to slightly above normal fire season for JAS 2022 describes a similar outlook to that of JAS 2021, when the models pointed to mild droughts and a mildly active fire season, observed especially in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon. However, the climatic conditions leading up to the dry season are distinct. The 3-month SPI for June 2021 (corresponding to conditions from April to June) indicated a mild drought in the western Amazon (Fig. 5a), which persisted through JAS (Fig. 4b). In contrast, the June 2022 SPI shows anomalously positive precipitation (Fig. 5b) in most of the Amazon, however, that does not include the southern fringes including Madre de Dios in Peru, northern Bolivia, and the Brazilian states of Acre and Rondônia. Here, precipitation could accelerate vegetation water stress and lead to favorable conditions for burning early in the JAS fire season.

•   Fire Forecasts 2021  
•   Fire Forecasts July-September 2023 

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