Prediction of fire season severity in South America — 2014

              

(Predictions for other years: 2012 | 2013 | 2014)

Overview of the 2014 fire season severity (FSS) prediction

This webpage presents a prediction of fire risk for the 2014 dry season in high biomass burning regions of South America. The following figure presents fire season severity indices (FSSI, ranging from 0-100) for 6 states in Brazil (Acre, Amazonas, Maranhao, Mato Grosso, Para, and Rondonia), 3 departments in Bolivia (El Beni, Pando, and Santa Cruz), and one country (Peru) using sea surface temperature information through the end of May. Green indicates below average predictions of fire activity whereas orange and red indicate above average activity. The 2014 fire season is predicted to be below average across the southern Amazon, based on cool sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the tropical Atlantic and Pacific oceans at the end of the Amazon wet season. Projected FSS is close to the 25th percentile in all regions, relative to the long term mean FSS. A detailed description of the prediction method is given here.

FSS predictions compared to observations

This figure compares the observed and modeled FSS in South America fire regions. The black solid lines are observations for past years, and the black dashed horizontal lines represent the all year mean observed values. The orange lines are FSS derived from the empirical model. The orange shades indicate the range of predicted FSS in 2014 for each region. The numbers in the parentheses represent the coefficient of determination (r2). Information on sea surface temperatures through May of 2014 were evaluated for these predictions. Click the boxes below the figure to see previous predicitons using earlier data.

Satellite observation of active fires

FSS is the sum of active fire counts (FC) during the fire season. Active fires are the thermal radiation anomalies created by fires that are detected by satellites. Our empirical model was based on active fire observations from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board the NASA Terra satellite.

Ocean climate indices

To predict FSS in South America, we used two climate indices that represent the sea surface temperature anomalies in Pacific and Atlantic: ONI (Ocean Nino Index) and AMO (Atlantic Multidecadel Oscillation index). The following figure shows time series of ONI and AMO since 2000.

Relationship between ocean climate indices and FSS

Terrestrial water storage

References

Glossary

Acknowledgements

This work is funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant GBMF3269 and the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

This work is the result of a collaboration between University of California, Irvine (Yang Chen and Jim Randerson), NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Doug Morton and James Collatz), Columbia Univeristy (Ruth DeFries and Miriam Marlier), University of Maryland (Louis Giglio), and Duke University (Prasad Kasibhatla).

NASA provided the satellite observations of fires and NOAA provided the sea surface temperature time series used in our analysis. The interactive figures and maps were generated using Google's Chart API , Maps API, and Fusion table API .

Adriana Lucia Romero Olivares at UC Irvine translated this forecast website to Spanish.

Disclaimer

The model predictions contained on this website are highly experimental. They cannot be used to predict the occurrence of individual fires. Use of this information for planning purposes should also draw upon other independent and reliable climate information sources. The Regents of The University of California will not be liable for any consequences that may occur if you rely on this information.


Contact: Yang.Chen@uci; Updated in 07/11/2014