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A pan-tropical cascade of fire driven by El Niño/Southern Oscillation

Nature Climate Change volume 7, pages 906–911 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

The El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has a pronounced influence on year-to-year variations in climate1. The response of fires to this forcing2 is complex and has not been evaluated systematically across different continents. Here we use satellite data to create a climatology of burned-area and fire-emissions responses, drawing on six El Niño and six La Niña events during 1997–2016. On average, reductions in precipitation and terrestrial water storage increased fire emissions in pan-tropical forests by 133% during and following El Niño as compared with La Niña. Fires peaked in equatorial Asia early in the ENSO cycle when El Niño was strengthening (Aug–Oct), before moving to southeast Asia and northern South America (Jan–Apr), Central America (Mar–May) and the southern Amazon (Jul–Oct) during the following year. Large decreases in fire occurred across northern Australia during Sep–Oct of the second year from a reduced fuel availability. Satellite observations of aerosols and carbon monoxide provided independent confirmation of the spatiotemporal evolution of fire anomalies. The predictable cascade of fire across different tropical continents described here highlights an important time delay in the Earth system’s response to precipitation redistribution. These observations help to explain why the growth rate of atmospheric CO2 increases during El Niño3 and may contribute to improved seasonal fire forecasts.

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Fig. 1: Time series of monthly SST anomalies averaged in the Niño3.4 region for the period 1997–2016.
Fig. 2: Multiple tropical regions contribute to the spatial and temporal pattern of fire anomalies during an ENSO event.
Fig. 3
Fig. 4: The cascade in fire impacts from ENSO across tropical land regions.
Fig. 5: Time delays between drought and the fire emissions response during ENSO in tropical regions.

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Acknowledgements

Y.C., N.A. and J.T.R. received funding support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF3269). J.T.R. received additional support from NASA’s Terrestrial Hydrology, Interdisciplinary Science and Carbon Monitoring System programs. D.M. was supported by NASA’s Interdisciplinary Science and Carbon Monitoring System Programs. G.v.d.W. was supported by the European Research Center (grant 280061). We thank the NOAA State of the Ocean website, the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center, the NOAA ESRL Physical Sciences Division and the NASA MEaSUREs Program for providing data used in this analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA

    Yang Chen & James T. Randerson

  2. Biospheric Sciences Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, 20771, USA

    Douglas C. Morton & Niels Andela

  3. Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Guido R. van der Werf

  4. Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Louis Giglio

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Contributions

Y.C. and J.T.R. designed the study, Y.C. conducted the analysis, Y.C., D.C.M., N.A. and J.T.R. wrote the manuscript. G.v.d.W. and L.G. contributed to the interpretation of the fire-emissions and burned-area observations. All the authors contributed to the manuscript preparation and editing.

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Correspondence to Yang Chen.

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Supplementary Tables 1–4, Supplementary Figures 1–7, Supplementary Section 1

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Chen, Y., Morton, D.C., Andela, N. et al. A pan-tropical cascade of fire driven by El Niño/Southern Oscillation. Nature Clim Change 7, 906–911 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-017-0014-8

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