The severe, devastating wildfires that raged across southeastern Australia in late 2019 and early 2020 packed a powerful punch that extended far beyond the country, two new studies find.
Meteorologist Ivar van der Velde of the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Leiden and colleagues first examined carbon monoxide data collected over southeastern Australia by the satellite-based instrument TROPOMI from November 2019 to January 2020, during the worst of the fires. Then, to get new estimates of the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the fires, the team used previously determined ratios of carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide emitted by the region’s eucalyptus forests — the predominant type of forest that was scorched in the blazes — during earlier wildfires and prescribed burns.
Van der Velde’s team estimates that the fires released from 517 trillion to 867 trillion grams of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. “The sheer magnitude of CO2 that was emitted to the atmosphere … was much larger than what we initially thought it would be,” van der Velde says. The emissions “from this single event were significantly higher than what all Australians normally emit with the combustion of fossil fuels in an entire year.”
Meteorologist Ivar van der Velde of the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research in Leiden and colleagues first examined carbon monoxide data collected over southeastern Australia by the satellite-based instrument TROPOMI from November 2019 to January 2020, during the worst of the fires. Then, to get new estimates of the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the fires, the team used previously determined ratios of carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide emitted by the region’s eucalyptus forests — the predominant type of forest that was scorched in the blazes — during earlier wildfires and prescribed burns.
Van der Velde’s team estimates that the fires released from 517 trillion to 867 trillion grams of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. “The sheer magnitude of CO2 that was emitted to the atmosphere … was much larger than what we initially thought it would be,” van der Velde says. The emissions “from this single event were significantly higher than what all Australians normally emit with the combustion of fossil fuels in an entire year.”
