Extreme wildfires like these will continue to have a large impact on global climate.
An astronaut aboard the International Space Station photographed wildfire smoke from Nova Scotia billowing over the Atlantic Ocean in May 2023. Warm weather and lack of rain fueled blazes across Canada last year, burning 5% of the country’s forests.Stoked by Canada’s warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon, NASA scientists have found.
Carbon monoxide from Canada wildfires curls thousands of miles across North America in this animation showing data from summer 2023. Lower concentrations are shown in purple; higher concentrations are in yellow. Red triangles indicate fire hotspots.They found that the Canadian fires released more carbon in five months than Russia or Japan emitted from fossil fuels in all of 2022 .
The scientists started with the end result of the fires: the amount of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere during the fire season. Then they “back-calculated” how large the emissions must have been to produce that amount of CO. They were able to estimate how much CO2 was released based on ratios between the two gases in the fire plumes.
To explain why Canada’s fire season was so intense in 2023, the authors of the new study cited tinderbox conditions across its forests. Climate data revealed the warmest and driest fire season since at least 1980. Temperatures in the northwest part of the country — where 61% of fire emissions occurred — were more than 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit above average from May through September. Precipitation was also more than 3 inches below average for much of the year.
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NASA study tallies carbon emissions from massive Canadian firesStoked by Canada's warmest and driest conditions in decades, extreme forest fires in 2023 released about 640 million metric tons of carbon, NASA scientists have found. That's comparable in magnitude to the annual fossil fuel emissions of a large industrialized nation.
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