Russia: 74 million acres burned through August 2012

NASA image, acquired September 11, 2012

From NASA Earth Observatory
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=79161

The summer of 2012 has proven to be the most severe wildfire season Russia has faced in a decade. Unlike 2010, when severe fires raged in western Russia, most of the fires in 2012 have burned through taiga in remote parts of eastern and central Siberia.

On September 11, 2012, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of fires burning in Tomsk, a region of south central Siberia where severe wildfires have burned throughout the summer. Thick smoke billowed from numerous wildfires near the Ob River and mixed with haze and clouds that arrived from the southwest. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected the unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires.

More than 17,000 wildfires had burned more than 30 million hectares (74 million acres) through August 2012, according to researchers at the Sukachev Institute of Forest in the Russian Academy of Sciences. In comparison, 20 million hectares burned last year, which was roughly the average between 2000 and 2008, according to an analysis of MODIS data published in 2010.

Another way to gauge the severity of a wildfire season is to consider the smoke emissions. Fires emit a range of gases and particles into the atmosphere that can be detected by ground-based, aircraft, and satellite instruments. The two most common emissions are carbon dioxide and water vapor; however, incomplete combustion also generates carbon monoxide, an odorless and poisonous gas. In fact, fires are the source of about half of all carbon monoxide in the atmosphere.

Though ground and aircraft sensors provide the most accurate measurements of carbon monoxide for a localized area, satellites offer the best way to monitor wildfire emissions over broad regions, particularly in remote areas where there are fewer ground-based instruments. Christine Wiedinmyer, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has developed a model that ingests MODIS observations of fires and combines them with other information about vegetation (such as the percentage of tree cover and the type of forest) to calculate the quantity of emissions.

In September 2012, Wiedinmyer used her model to calculate Russian fire emissions for every year dating back to 2002. She found that the amount of carbon monoxide produced in 2012 was significantly more than what was produced in 2010 and the second most in a decade. Through August 31, the model showed that Russian wildfires had released an estimated 48 teragrams of carbon monoxide since the beginning of 2012. By comparison, the model estimated fires yielded just 22 teragrams of carbon monoxide in all of 2010.

Only one year—2003—had higher overall emissions. In that year, when severe fires burned in eastern Russia, wildfires produced an estimated 72 teragrams of carbon monoxide.

References
- Wiedinmyer, C. (2011). The Fire Inventory from NCAR (FINN): a High Resolution Global Model to Estimate the Emissions from Open Burning. Geoscience Model Development.
- Vivhar, A. (2010, July 13). Wildfires in Russia in 2008-2008: Estimates of Burn Areas Using Satellite MODIS MCD45. Remote Sensing Letters.
- Langmann, B. (2009, July 13). Vegetation Fire Emissions and Their Impact on Air Pollution and Climate. Atmospheric Environment.

Further Reading
- Russian Government. (2012, August 6). Dmitry Medvedev on a Working Visit to the Tomsk Region Holds a Meeting on the Situation in the Constituent Entities of the Russian Federation Suffering from Abnormally High Temperatures in 2012.Accessed September 12, 2012.
- Russian Government. (2012, August 6). Dmitry Medvedev Holds a Meeting With Tomsk Region Governor Sergei Zhvachkin. Accessed September 12, 2012.
- Ranson, J. (2012, July). Siberia 2012: A Slow and Smoky Arrival. Notes from the Field.

NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Adam Voiland, with information from Christine Wiedinmyer, Jon Ranson, and Vyacheslav Kharuk. Instrument: Aqua - MODIS

Fires are raging again across Russia

NASA satellite image, acquired April 24, 2012 

Back in April, thousands of hectares were burning when NASA captured above image of fires in a rural area north of Omsk, a city in south central Russia near the Kazakhstan border, according to the NASA report accompanying the image.

In May 6, 2012, the Voice of Russia reported some 11000 hectares (about 42.4 square miles) of forests in Siberia to be on fire.

Lena River, Siberia - Wikipedia

Earlier this month, eight Russian paratroopers died fighting a massive forest fire in southern Siberia, reports UPI.

Russia has now declared a state of emergency in several eastern regions, due to hundreds of wildfires, reports NASA.

Smoke from fires burning in Siberia can travel across the Pacific Ocean and into North America. A NASA analysis of satellite images shows that aerosols from fires took six days to reach America's shores. In certain cases they saw smoke that actually circles the globe, describes NASA.

These fires are causing a lot of emissions, including soot that can be deposited on the ice in the Arctic, resulting in more sunlight to be absorbed which will speed up the melt.

Furthermore, high temperatures in Siberia will warm up the water in rivers, causing warm water to flow into the Arctic, as illustrated by above Wikipedia image highlighting the Lena River and the August 3, 2010, satellite image below, showing warm river water heat up the Laptev Sea (degrees Celsius).

The image below was edited from a report by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, describing that the globally-averaged temperature for May 2012 marked the second warmest May since record keeping began in 1880.

NOAA image, temperature anomalies for May 2012

The image below was edited from a recent NASA report describing a total of 198 fires burning across Russia. As the inset shows, the fires on the main image are part of an area where further fires are raging.

NASA satellite image, acquired June 18, 2012

Below are two maps from the NOAA Climate Prediction Center, showing temperature anomalies in Southern Russia for the week from June 10th to 16th, 2012, of over 7 degrees Celsius (12.6 degrees Fahrenheit), with temperatures in areas around the Caspian Sea reaching over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).

Perhaps even more worrying than high temperatures in Southern Russia are high temperature anomalies in Northern Siberia, some of which were in the 16-18 degrees Celsius range for the week from June 10-16th, 2012 (see NOAA image below).

Satellite image June 15, 2012 from DMI - http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/satellite/index.uk.php

Source: mapsofworld.com via Sam on Pinterest

One for the Table Gets Ready for the Holidays

Amy Ephron's One for the Table recently posted a holiday special called "Xmas on Your Doorstep." Regular contributors were asked to talk about,

... their favorite things that come in the mail at Xmas. We always think that one of the nicest things to do, if you can’t be with someone at the holidays, is to send something that can be part of their holiday meal, Xmas dinner, Xmas breakfast. A favorite jam, a basket of muffins, crab cakes, caviar (although this may not be the year for that), an apple pie, candleholders, a smoked ham or turkey, or even barbecued brisket!

Steven Zaillian, Alan Zweibel, Agatha French, Emily Fox, Susan Dolgen, Lisa Dinsmore, Andrea Pyenson, David Israel, Seale Ballenger, and Brenda Athanus remembered with fondness gifts that came in the mail that were as varied as "Mexican wedding cookies" and "a small shovel".

I contributed my own more conflicted response, detailing what was a continuing debate in my parents' household during the holiday season. My father was all in favor of Mail Order Food. My mother was not.

Mail Order Food

I associate mail order food with my father. When I was growing up, he and I had very few connections. He took me to only one professional football game. He never came to Back-to-School Night and had no interest in any of my hobbies. I remember him as dour, not very talkative and disapproving. I was part of his second family and he was, I’m certain, just a bit too old to have a young kid running around.

Added to that, my father was burdened by tragedy. He was the eldest son of a prosperous Jewish family in Odessa on the Black Sea. Unfortunately when the Russian Revolution swept across the country, Bolsheviks rampaged through his neighborhood, lining up and shooting many people, including my father’s family. Being Jewish and well-to-do were two strikes too many at a time when “line them up against the wall” was meant literally.

Luckily for my father, when all this happened, he was studying at the University of Kiev. He learned later that his mother had survived because she had very thick hair. When she was shot at point blank range, the gunpowder was apparently so weak that the bullet merely lodged in her hair, knocking her unconscious and otherwise leaving her unharmed. My father never returned home to Odessa, having been told that he needed to flee the country, which he promptly did.

This is a long way of saying that my father spent his entire life reacting to this tragic event. The few times I remember him being happy was when he watched wrestling on TV (remember Gorgeous George?) and when the mail order food packages arrived during the holidays.

I was convinced that those packages reconnected him with happier memories of his family in Odessa. I remember watching him at the dining room table as he unpacked the treats he'd ordered: wine soaked cheddar in crocks, salamis rolled in herbs, specialty English crackers, chocolates from Belgium, tins of anchovies and sardines, glass jars with Italian antipasti, pasteurized caviar from the Caspian Sea, and cellophane wrapped packages of Russian black bread. He would get out a plate and encourage my mother and myself to share them with him. It would take him several days to finish everything and in that time he would munch away contentedly, a smile on his face.

But for my mother, those packages were an issue of contention. To her they were an extravagance. We had to watch our expenses in those days and we couldn't afford such luxuries, but my dad was old school and felt that this was one of his few pleasures and he should be indulged. Unfortunately my father had inherited his family's love of the good life without having inherited their wealth.

My dad died some years ago, my mom in 2006, but when the holiday catalogues start to arrive around Thanksgiving, I relive their debate about mail order food. The catalogues I enjoy the most are from Williams-Sonoma and Sur La Table with their exquisite photographs and seductive descriptions. I look lovingly at the boxes of Handcrafted Toffee, Cream-Nut Milk-Chocolate Peanut Butter Clusters, Perfect Endings Cupcakes, Chocolate-Dipped Peppermint Moravian Cookies, wheels of Stilton Cheese, the D'Artagnan Pate Collection, and the Niman Ranch Applewood Smoked Ham. And I am seriously tempted to buy something.

Then I look at the prices and return to my senses. My mother taught me all too well. Her reproof to my father that mail order food is too expensive rings in my ears and, besides which, as she and my grandmother always said, "Never buy retail." And yet, that smoked ham sounds really delicious, as does the handcrafted toffee, and there would be the added pleasure of connecting with my father who, for all his many faults, did imbue me with a love of good food.