Author(s):
Le Page, Y. 
; Pereira, J.M.C. ; Trigo, R. ; Camara, C. ; Oom, D. ; Mota, B.
Date: 2008
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/5135
Origin: Repositório da UTL
Subject(s): fire; climatic influence
Description
Vegetation fires have been acknowledged as an environmental
process of global scale, which affects the chemical
composition of the troposphere, and has profound ecological
and climatic impacts. However, considerable uncertainty
remains, especially concerning intra and inter-annual
variability of fire incidence. The main goals of our globalscale
study were to characterise spatial-temporal patterns of
fire activity, to identify broad geographical areas with similar
vegetation fire dynamics, and to analyse the relationship
between fire activity and the El Ni˜no-Southern Oscillation.
This study relies on 10 years (mid 1996–mid
2006) of screened European Space Agency World Fire Atlas
(WFA) data, obtained from Along Track Scanning Radiometer
(ATSR) and Advanced ATSR (AATSR) imagery.
Empirical Orthogonal Function analysis was used to reduce
the dimensionality of the dataset. Regions of homogeneous
fire dynamics were identified with cluster analysis, and interpreted
based on their eco-climatic characteristics. The
impact of 1997–1998 El Ni˜no is clearly dominant over the
study period, causing increased fire activity in a variety of
regions and ecosystems, with variable timing. Overall, this
study provides the first global decadal assessment of spatialtemporal
fire variability and confirms the usefulness of the
screened WFA for global fire ecoclimatology research
