Fire Forecasts 2021
Southern Amazon
2021 forecasts show average fire risk in the southern Amazon, in contrast to 2020
Authors: Kátia Fernandes, Douglas Morton
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 escape into neighboring forests and burn through the understory. Even these low-intensity surface fires kill most trees, since Amazon forests are not adapted to fire.
Seasonal Fire Forecasts
The NTA index is then used to predict JAS fire anomalies in western Amazon. JAS sea surface temperature forecast in the Atlantic (initialized in June) points to an average to slightly above-average JAS fire season predicted for western Amazon (shown as light pink shades in Fig. 1). Gaps in the map represent areas with no fires or with poor relationship to the NTA index.
Fig 1. July-September 2021 fire season forecast (June initialization). https://firecast.cast.uark.edu/
Statistical Model for Fire Forecasting
A second statistical fire forecast model (Chen et al., 2011) covers the entire southern Amazon regions of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. This forecast relies on SST observations from the tropical Pacific and Atlantic oceans, in combination with 20 years of satellite fire detections from the MODIS instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite. The 2021 Fire Season Severity Forecast for different southern Amazon regions shows similar results to the model by Fernandes and colleagues, pointing to below-average fire activity for most regions except Santa Cruz, Bolivia (Fig. 2). A new interactive website hosted by the Amazonia hub of SERVIR, a NASA-USAID effort to increase the use of satellite observations for regional awareness and decision making, provides further details about the model and historic performance.
Fig. 2. Forecast of the 2021 Fire Season Severity for regions in the southern Amazon.
Fire season severity outlook
Even though the two models use different methodologies, both forecasts converge to an average climate-driven fire risk in 2021. It’s 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 rare in the Amazon, even in dry years. Nonetheless, seasonal forecasts of fire risk can provide important situational awareness for how climate conditions may favor (droughts) or inhibit (rainy) widespread fire activity. Using real-time fire detections from NASA and NOAA satellites, the SERVIR team and scientists in the Amazon region will continue to track new fire ignitions and fire spread throughout the fire season ( http://globalfiredata.org/pages/amazon-dashboard/ ).
Amazon Dashboard
Western Amazon
The Amazon Dashboard tracks individual fires in the Amazon region using a new approach to cluster and classify VIIRS active fire detections by fire type (see Methods ). Based on the fire location, intensity, duration, and spread rate, each individual event is classified as a deforestation fire, understory forest fire, small clearing & agricultural fire, or savanna fire. The data and summary figures are updated daily using the combined active fire detections from the VIIRS instruments on the Suomi-NPP and NOAA-20 satellites. Please use the map interface to explore specific regions or fires of interest, including fires burning in protected areas or indigenous territories, or download the data in shapefile format for a complete look at 2020 fire activity across the southern Amazon study region (0-25S).
Embedded Tool: Amazon Dashboard
Climate conditions leading up to the dry seasons of 2020 and 2021
Forecasts for average fire risk in 2021 describes a very different outlook than that of JAS 2020, when the models pointed to droughts and an active fire season. Another interesting aspect that distinguishes these two years concerns the climatic condition leading up to the dry season. In 2020, the month of May registered mostly near normal to above normal precipitation which likely dampened the fire season severity in some sectors (Fig. 3). In contrast, the month of May 2021 has seen unusually dry conditions in the western Amazon, especially in the Department of San Martín in Peru, the Bolivian Amazon, and the Pantanal biome, which could accelerate vegetation water stress and create favorable conditions for fires early in the season.
Fig. 3. Standardized precipitation index for May 2020 and May 2021
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