Arctic Peat- And Forest-fire Information System

This action will develop a new wildfire information service for the Arctic and northern latitudes based on Sentinel data and Copernicus services for climate aware citizens, environmental agencies, civil protection, forest industry and cross-Arctic entities. Separating peat and forest fires, maps will show regions of active fires and burned areas. For large fires impacted areas due to transport of aerosols and gases will be estimated. 

Climate change, with temperatures increasing twice as much in the Arctic compared with other regions (Arctic amplification), will increase the frequency of wildfires in the future. This raises public concerns about climate impacts from fires, such as increased air pollution in nearby cities, the possible consequences of light absorbing emissions on ice melting, and the pronounced disturbance of Earth’s radiative balance. Fires in the northern high latitudes release significant amounts of CO2, CH4, N2O, black carbon (BC) and organic carbon (OC), and their emissions are often transported into Arctic regions. To accurately estimate their climate impact, the type of the fires, i.e. the primary fuel type needs to be assessed for each fire, as there are significant differences in the intensity and composition of emissions. 

In Northern latitudes, melting permafrost can expose peat, which is partly decomposed vegetation that formed in wetlands over the cause of hundreds of years. Peat stores carbon similar in size to the current atmospheric carbon pool. Dried peatlands are vulnerable to fires burning into the peat layers. Peat fires can burn for months at comparatively low temperatures, generating whitish haze in the lowermost atmosphere, which is high in organic carbon. In contrast to smouldering peat fires, the plume of flaming wildfires is of greyish to black colours with high soot content.

The APFF action will focus on high latitude fires in the next years, aiming at becoming an Arctic peat and forest- fire information system. This downstream service will build upon Copernicus operational data products, in combination with custom retrieval algorithms from Sentinel data. The specific products to be developed are a) areas of active fire, b) burned area within a specific land cover, as well as c) impact areas (due to atmospheric transport).