Fire in the Earth System

Earth observation is the only means of quantifying landscape fire’s rapidly changing nature and extreme interannual variability, which is currently hard to capture in models.

Fires are central to both maintaining and destroying key Earth ecosystems. Fires are an inherent component of global bio-geophysical cycling, and a major source of air pollution resulting in the deaths of many hundreds of thousands annually. The magnitude, significance and impact of fire on ecosystems and the atmosphere means its importance cuts across many of the other NCEO science areas.

Studying landscape fire and its Earth system impacts requires a combination of Earth Observation, field and laboratory measurement, and simulation modelling. At NCEO we utilise these methods to better quantify and understand fire and its effects at scales from local to global, considering everything from small-scale agricultural burning, to deforestation fires and peatland ‘megafire’ events.

A key focus of our work is to better quantity the amount of carbon moved by fire from the land to the atmosphere, the resulting emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO₂ and methane, and the release of health-impacting components such as fine particulate matter and gaseous carcinogens. Such information enables the role of fire in the carbon cycle and climate to be better assessed, including via the development of better and more accurate representations of fire for use within climate modelling. Additionally, we examine trends in global fire and its impacts driven by both climate and human activity change, including on the health and wellbeing of the hundreds of millions of people exposed to smoke pollution worldwide.

On average, global satellite data suggest that around 3.5 million km² of land burns every year, equivalent to the area of India. Current global mapping misses thousands of smaller burns that are not included.

Professor Martin Wooster
NCEO Divisional Director of Fire in the Earth System, based at King’s College London.

Key research groups

NCEO’s work on landscape fire and its impacts is primarily located within King’s College Earth Observation and Wildfire Research Group, and the universities of Leicester, Leeds and Edinburgh.

In the UK some of our key collaborators are the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfire, Environment and Society; ECMWF for whom we have led the development of the Global Fire Assimilation System, and CEH who are developing improved global fire models.

Internationally we have major collaborations and projects with NASA, ESA and EUMETSAT as well as with national-level agencies and universities across Canada, Asia, Africa and elsewhere.

Research priorities

• What it the true magnitude of global fire activity, greenhouse gas release and smoke emission and how can this be best quantified and monitored using EO satellites?
• Are there trends in regional to global-scale fire, and what are their drivers?
• What is the future of fire on Earth and how can this be better incorporated into global climate models?
• What is the nature and variability of fires impact on the natural and human environment, and human health?

Our current work includes

• Developing methods to quantify fire emissions from EO satellite data.
• Studying long-term EO data records of fire and smoke, and linking these with those of climate and human behaviour change.
• Installing networks of in situ sensors and undertaking field and laboratory measurements to validate satellite and model-based fire measures.
• Combining these data and knowledge within Earth system models to evaluate fire impacts and the effects of changing fire activity.