Forest fire size amplifies postfire land surface warming.

ABSTRACT: Climate warming has caused a widespread increase in extreme fire weather, making forest fires longer-lived and larger^1-3. The average forest fire size in Canada, the USA and Australia has doubled or even tripled in recent decades^4,5. In return, forest fires feed back to climate by modulating land-atmospheric carbon, nitrogen, aerosol, energy and water fluxes^6-8. However, the surface climate impacts of increasingly large fires and their implications for land management remain to be established. Here we use satellite observations to show that in temperate and boreal forests in the Northern Hemisphere, fire size persistently amplified decade-long postfire land surface warming in summer per unit burnt area. Both warming and its amplification with fire size were

SUBMITTER: Zhao J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11424489 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature