Russia's forests play an important role in the global carbon cycle. Because of their scale and interannual variability, forest fires can change the direction of the net carbon flux over Eurasia. 2002 and 2003 were the first two consecutive years in the atmospheric record in which the carbon content rose by more than 2 ppm per year. Northern Hemisphere fires could be the reason. We show that 2002 and 2003 were the two years with the largest fire extent in Central Siberia since 1996 using new measurements of burned forest area in Central Siberia derived from remote sensing. To quantify the relationship between Siberian forest fires and climate variability, we compare these measurements with time‐series of large‐scale climatic indices for the period 1992–2003. This paper is amongst the first studies that analyse statistical relationships between interannual variability of forest fires in Russia and climate indices. Significant relationships of annual burned forest area with the Arctic Oscillation, summer temperatures, precipitation, and the El Niño index NINO4 were found (p < 0.1). In contrast, we find no significant relation with the El Niño indices NINO1, NINO3 or SOI (p > 0.1). Interannual forest fire variability in Central Siberia could best be explained by a combination of the Arctic Oscillation index and regional summer temperatures (r2 = 0.80).
Although the effect of pollution on forest health and decline received much attention in the 1980s, it has not been considered to explain the ‘Divergence Problem’ in dendroclimatology; a decoupling of tree growth from rising air temperatures since the 1970s. Here we use physical and biogeochemical measurements of hundreds of living and dead conifers to reconstruct the impact of heavy industrialisation around Norilsk in northern Siberia. Moreover, we develop a forward model with surface irradiance forcing to quantify long‐distance effects of anthropogenic emissions on the functioning and productivity of Siberia’s taiga. Downwind from the world’s most polluted Arctic region, tree mortality rates of up to 100% have destroyed 24,000 km2 boreal forest since the 1960s, coincident with dramatic increases in atmospheric sulphur, copper, and nickel concentrations. In addition to regional ecosystem devastation, we demonstrate how ‘Arctic Dimming’ can explain the circumpolar ‘Divergence Problem’, and discuss implications on the terrestrial carbon cycle.
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