NASA Keeps Tabs on Southern Africa's Fire Season
EarthVision Environmental News
September 28, 2000
WASHINGTON, September 28, 2000 - NASA said it has been keeping tabs on Southern Africa's fire season, which is winding down, to see the impact of these fires on the global climate and the region's air quality and ecosystems. The Space Agency notes that this time of year Southern Africa routinely sees burns larger than the states of Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, North Dakota and South Dakota combined. But with the heavy rains earlier this year and subsequent new plant growth, this year's burning season could end up being twice as large as normal say researchers involved in the "SAFARI 2000" project.
Formally known as the Southern African Regional Science Initiative, the project brings together nearly 200 African, US, and international scientists in an effort to understand the sustainability of the region's sensitive and pressured ecosystems. The field experiment combines observations from NASA's Terra and Landsat 7 spacecraft, NASA's ER-2 high-altitude research aircraft and several other aircraft and ground stations.
SAFARI 2000 coincides with Southern Africa's dry season, the time of the most extensive biomass burning. The region is subject to some of the highest levels of biomass burning in the world.
"This will be a humdinger of a season," says ecologist Robert Scholes of the South African research organization CSIR Environmentek and one of the organizers of SAFARI 2000. Some "good news" about the increased burning is that grass-fueled fires burn rapidly and do little damage to mature trees. According to NASA in an average year nearly 500,000 square miles of grasslands burns in Africa south of the equator.
In addition to observations of the fires and smoke from space, SAFARI 2000 researchers are using airborne and ground-based scientific instruments to sample the chemistry and measure the thickness of the smoke plumes, map the movements of large plumes, and investigate how smoke and other fine particles affect clouds. The collective data will be used to improve the ability of new instruments on Terra to monitor active fires, map "burn scars" left after the fires, and measure the amount of carbon monoxide in the lower atmosphere.
Fire management practices are a subject of much debate in Southern Africa, as they are in the United States, says Scholes. But in Africa fire is considered less of a disaster and more of a natural and necessary part of healthy ecosystem functioning.
Photographs of South African fires and SAFARI 2000 field activities are available at:
ftp://pao.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/safarifires.