Fires raged once again across Indonesia in the latter half of 2015, creating a state of emergency due to poisonous smoke and haze across Southeast Asia as well as incurring great financial costs to the government. A strong El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) led to drought in many parts of Indonesia, resulting in elevated fire occurrence comparable with the previous catastrophic event in 1997/1998. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data promise to provide improved detection of land use and land cover changes in the tropics as compared to methodologies dependent upon cloud- and haze-free images. This study presents the first spatially explicit estimates of burned area across Sumatra, Kalimantan, and West Papua based on high-resolution Sentinel-1A SAR imagery. Here, we show that 4,604,569 hectares (ha) were burned during the 2015 fire season (overall accuracy 84%), and compare this with other existing operational burned area products (MCD64, GFED4.0, GFED4.1s). Intersection of burned area with fine-scale land cover and peat layer maps indicates that 0.89 gigatons carbon dioxide equivalents (Gt CO e) were released through the fire event. This result is compared to other estimates based on nonspatially explicit thermal anomaly measurements or atmospheric monitoring. Using freely available SAR C-band data from the Sentinel mission, we argue that the presented methodology is able to quickly and precisely detect burned areas, supporting improvement in fire control management as well as enhancing accuracy of emissions estimation.
Vast and disastrous fires occurred on Borneo during the 2015 dry season, pushing Indonesia into the top five carbon emitting countries. The region was affected by a very strong El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate phenomenon, on par with the last severe event in 1997/98. Fire dynamics in Central Kalimantan were investigated using an innovative sensor offering higher sensitivity to a wider range of fire intensities at a finer spatial resolution (160 m) than heretofore available. The sensor is onboard the TET-1 satellite, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) FireBird mission. TET-1 images (acquired every 2–3 days) from the middle infrared were used to detect fires continuously burning for almost three weeks in the protected peatlands of Sebangau National Park as well as surrounding areas with active logging and oil palm concessions. TET-1 detection capabilities were compared with MODIS active fire detection and Landsat burned area algorithms. Fire dynamics, including fire front propagation speed and area burned, were investigated. We show that TET-1 has improved detection capabilities over MODIS in monitoring low-intensity peatland fire fronts through thick smoke and haze. Analysis of fire dynamics revealed that the largest burned areas resulted from fire front lines started from multiple locations, and the highest propagation speeds were in excess of 500 m/day (all over peat > 2m deep). Fires were found to occur most often in concessions that contained drainage infrastructure but were not cleared prior to the fire season. Benefits of implementing this sensor system to improve current fire management techniques are discussed. Near real-time fire detection together with enhanced fire behavior monitoring capabilities would not only improve firefighting efforts, but also benefit analysis of fire impact on tropical peatlands, greenhouse gas emission estimations as well as mitigation measures to reduce severe fire events in the future.
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