Carbon emissions to the atmosphere
The second immediate major impact can be estimated by the fire gases emissions to the atmosphere. The Fire Radiative Power of a fire pixel is measured in megawatts and represents the amount of radiant heat energy liberated per unit time from the burning contained in a pixel. This FRP-PIXEL value is related to the rate at which fuel is being consumed (Wooster et al., 2005) and the energy release is a direct result of the combustion process, whereby carbon-based fuel is oxidised as CO2 with the release of a certain "heat yield", a fraction of which is emitted as electromagnetic radiation that can be measured with remote sensing instrumentation. The temporal integration of the FRP measured over the lifetime of the fire provides a measure of the total Fire Radiative Energy (FRE), which is proportional to the total fuel mass combusted. Simple linear relationships linking FRP, FRE and fuel consumption were first demonstrated in detail by Wooster et al. (2005).
| Fuel biomass combusted (kg) = 0.368(± 0.015) X Fire Radiative Energy (MJ) | (1) |
An estimation of the fuel biomass consumption during the Caramulo fires can be made in the following manner: The FRPPIXEL product integrated over space and over the entire fire event (Fire Radiative Energy) is used on equation (1) and the fuel of biomass combusted is estimated. Once computed the biomass combusted, it can be simply multiplied by the fraction of carbon contained in the fuel - usually assumed to be ~0.47 - to estimate the total carbon release. Using this simple approach it was conclude that during the Caramulo fires more than
1770 ton of Carbon were released to the atmosphere.