Assistant Prof @LSEGeography environmental change & sustainability 
wildfire emissions & modelling 
tropical peatlands 
innovative education
#firstgen
You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
Using a Global Landcover dataset, we see corroborating evidence that the spike in fire activity in 2019/20 occurred in both the boreal forest (tree cover) and tundra (herbaceous & shrub cover) ecosystems of the Arctic Circle [3/9]pic.twitter.com/rOzU3P47wM
Peat soils are widespread in Arctic & Boreal biomes. We can use a global peatland map to determine proportion of the fires burning on mapped areas known to contain peat. Around half of the fires are on peat soils, with a big increase in total fires on peat in 2019 & 2020 [4/9]pic.twitter.com/QPEpuEaVev
Some of these fires will have ignited underlying peat soils, although the area affected is difficult to determine from satellites. High-res imagery from @Sentinel_hub shows substantial areas of residual smouldering & fire spots burning long after the main fire has passed [5/9]pic.twitter.com/6rt1TPy6V0
A map of permafrost from @NSIDC can be used to delineate whether fires are burning on continuous vs discontinuous permafrost, & the ice loading of those areas. Almost all of the fires in 2019 & 2020 were on continuous permafrost with high ice loading [6/9]pic.twitter.com/u6Oy6Xry7z
Finally, if we look at the latitudinal distribution of all May/June fires north of 60-degrees. We can see a very unusual distribution in 2019 & 2020, a noticeable shift to the north. Watch the animation in the next tweet... [7/9]pic.twitter.com/EJSTGOMafj
Here's an animation of high latitude May/June fires accumulating from 2003 to 2020, watch the Arctic fires emerging in 2019 and 2020 at the end of the animation. [8/9]pic.twitter.com/1aZpA0mBh6
Data sources:
@NASAEarth Fire hotspots processed by @M_parrington @CopernicusECMWF
Global Landcover @EU_ScienceHub: https://forobs.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/glc2000/products.php …
Treeline and Permafrost @NSIDC: https://nsidc.org/data/ggd318
Global peat map (Yu et al., 2010: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230734743_Global_peatland_dynamics_since_the_Last_Glacial_Maximum …)
[9/9]
This fits the pattern that many peat areas will only burn in the dryest of years. Extensive peat bogs in Siberia have standing water most of the time.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
