Global Vegetation Fires in 2023 As Seen By GFAS in CAMS

Many regions of the world experienced extreme wildfire seasons during 2023 with many lives lost and excessive damage to property. The record-breaking vegetation fire activity started even before the onset of the El-Nino conditions. It released large amounts of aerosols, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and other trace gases into the atmosphere.

Each month of 2023, up to the time of submission of this abstract in August, showed unprecedented fire activity somewhere on Earth: It started off in Laos in January, continued in Chile in February, and in Western Australia in March and April. The record-breaking Canadian wildfires burnt from May to (at least) August. During July and August, the Mediterranean region, Canary Islands and Hawai’i experienced more exceptional wildfires.

The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) is tracking global fire activity and emissions with its Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS). GFAS uses satellite-based observations of fire radiative power (FRP), which links observed thermal radiation directly to the biomass combustion rate, i.e. amount of biomass burnt and corresponding emission of carbon into the atmosphere. The global atmosphere monitoring system of CAMS also tracks the atmospheric load of various smoke constituents by assimilating satellite-based observations of aerosols and carbon monoxide and other trace gases into the global circulation model of ECMWF. This comprehensive set of satellite-based observation allows a consistent monitoring of vegetation fires and their atmospheric smoke plumes since 2003.

Here, we present the global distribution of vegetation fires, or "biomass burning", of 2023 in the context of the last two decades. We will show the most relevant fire anomaly maps and regional time series as established in the BAMS State of the Climate reports since 2010, and corroborate the findings with the corresponding monitoring results for smoke aerosols and carbon monoxide.