Arctic News: Siberia

Showing posts with label Siberia. Show all posts

Saturday, July 6, 2013

Cruising for methane

Cruising for methane with Sam Carana, a video at youtube.com/watch?v=3l6PtWf4i9w

Thursday, June 27, 2013

The Threat of Wildfires in the North

NASA/NOAA image based on Suomi NPP satellite data from April 2012 to April 2013, with grid added

A new map has been issued by NOAA/NASA. The map shows that most vegetation grows in two bands, i.e. the Tropical Band (between latitudes 15°N and 15°S) and the Northern Band in between 45°N and 75°N, i.e. in North America, Europe and Siberia. On above image, the map is roughly overlayed with a grid to indicate latitude and longitude co-ordinates.

Vegetation in the Northern Band extends beyond the Arctic Circle (latitude 66° 33′ 44″ or 66.5622°, in blue on above image from Arcticsystem.no) into the Arctic, covering sparsely-populated areas such in Siberia, Alaska and the northern parts of Canada and Scandinavia. Further into the Arctic, there are huge areas with bush and shrubland that have taken thousands of years to develop, and once burnt, it can take a long time for vegetation to return, due to the short growing season and harsh conditions in the Arctic.

Above map with soil carbon content further shows that the top 100 cm of soil in the northern circumpolar region furthermore contains huge amounts of carbon.

May 16 2013 Drought 90 days Arctic

Global warming increases the risk of wildfires. This is especially applicable to the Arctic, where temperatures have been rising faster than anywhere else on Earth. Anomalies can be very high in specific cases, as illustrated by the temperature map below. High temperatures and drought combine to increase the threat of wildfires (see above image showing drought severity).

June 25, 2013 from Wunderground.com - Moscow broke its more than 100-year-old record for the hottest June 27

Zyryanka, Siberia, recently recorded a high of 37.4°C (99.3°F), against normal high temperatures of 20°C to 21°C for this time of year. Heat wave conditions were also recorded in Alaska recently, with temperatures as high as 96°F (36°C).

On June 19, 2013, NASA captured this image of smoke from wildfires burning in western Alaska. The smoke was moving west over Norton Sound. (The center of the image is roughly 163° West and 62° North.) Red outlines indicate hot spots with unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fire. NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response. Caption by Adam Voiland. - also see this post with NASA satellite image of Alaska.

Siberian wildfires June 21, from RobertScribbler

from methanetracker.org

Wildfires raged in Russia in 2010. Flames ravaged 1.25 million hectares (4,826 mi²) of land including 2,092 hectares of peat moor.

Damage from the fires is estimated to be $15 billion, in a report in the Guardian.

Cost of fire-fighting efforts and agricultural losses alone are estimated at over $2bn, reports Munich Re, adding that Moscow's inhabitants suffered under a dense cloud of smoke which enveloped the city. In addition to toxic gases, it also contained considerable amounts of particulate matter. Mortality increased significantly: the number of deaths in July and August was 56,000 higher than in the same months in 2009.

[From: Abrupt Local Warming, May 16, 2012]

Wildfires in the North threaten to cause large emissions of greenhouse gases and soot, which can settle on snow and ice in the Arctic and the Himalayan Plateau, with the resulting albedo changes causing a lot more sunlight to be absorbed, instead of reflected as was the case earlier. This in turn adds to the problem. Additionally, rising temperatures in the Arctic threaten to cause release of huge amounts of methane from sediments below the Arctic Ocean. This situation threatens to escalate into runway global warming in a matter of years, as illustrated by the image below.

How much will temperatures rise?

In conclusion, the risk is unacceptable and calls for a comprehensive and effective action plan that executes multiple lines of action in parallel, such as the 3-part Climate Action Plan below. Part 1 calls for a sustainable economy, i.e. dramatic reductions of pollutants on land, in oceans and in the atmosphere. Part 2 calls for heat management. Part 3 calls for methane management and further measures.

The Climate Action Plan set out in above diagram can be initiated immediately in any country, without the need for an international agreement to be reached first. This can avoid delays associated with complicated negotiations and on-going verification of implementation and progress in other nations.

In nations with both federal and state governments, such as the United States of America, the Climate Action Plan could be implemented as follows:

The President directs federal departments and agencies to reduce their emissions for each type of pollutant annually by a set percentage, say, CO2 and CH4 by 10%, and HFCs, N2O and soot by higher percentages.
The President demands states to each make the same cuts.
The President directs the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to monitor implementation of states and to act step in where a state looks set to fail to miss one or more targets, by imposing (federal) fees on applicable polluting products sold in the respective state, with revenues used for federal benefits.

Such federal benefits could include building interstate High-Speed Rail tracks, adaptation and conservation measures, management of national parks, R&D into batteries, ways to vegetate deserts and other land use measurements, all at the discretion of the EPA. The fees can be roughly calculated as the average of fees that other states impose in successful efforts to meet their targets.

This way, the decision how to reduce targets is largely delegated to state level, while states can similarly delegate decisions to local communities. While feebates, preferably implemented locally, are recommended as the most effective way to reach targets, each state and even each local community can largely decide how to implement things, provided that each of the targets are reached.

Similar targets could be adopted elsewhere in the world, and each nation could similarly delegate responsibilities to local communities. Additionally, it makes sense to agree internationally to impose extra fees on international commercial aviation, with revenues used to develop ways to cool the Arctic.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Huge patches of warm air over the Arctic

Over the past month or so, huge patches with temperature anomalies of over 20 degrees Celsius have been forming over the Arctic.

The three images below show such patches stretch out from Svalbard to Novaya Zemlya (top), north of Eastern Siberia (middle) and over West Greenland and Baffin Bay (bottom).

How these patches with warm air developed is further illustrated by the animation below, which goes from February 12, 2013, to March 18, 2013.

Russia: 74 million acres burned through August 2012

NASA image, acquired September 11, 2012

From NASA Earth Observatory
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=79161

The summer of 2012 has proven to be the most severe wildfire season Russia has faced in a decade. Unlike 2010, when severe fires raged in western Russia, most of the fires in 2012 have burned through taiga in remote parts of eastern and central Siberia.

On September 11, 2012, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of fires burning in Tomsk, a region of south central Siberia where severe wildfires have burned throughout the summer. Thick smoke billowed from numerous wildfires near the Ob River and mixed with haze and clouds that arrived from the southwest. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected the unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires.

More than 17,000 wildfires had burned more than 30 million hectares (74 million acres) through August 2012, according to researchers at the Sukachev Institute of Forest in the Russian Academy of Sciences. In comparison, 20 million hectares burned last year, which was roughly the average between 2000 and 2008, according to an analysis of MODIS data published in 2010.

Another way to gauge the severity of a wildfire season is to consider the smoke emissions. Fires emit a range of gases and particles into the atmosphere that can be detected by ground-based, aircraft, and satellite instruments. The two most common emissions are carbon dioxide and water vapor; however, incomplete combustion also generates carbon monoxide, an odorless and poisonous gas. In fact, fires are the source of about half of all carbon monoxide in the atmosphere.

Though ground and aircraft sensors provide the most accurate measurements of carbon monoxide for a localized area, satellites offer the best way to monitor wildfire emissions over broad regions, particularly in remote areas where there are fewer ground-based instruments. Christine Wiedinmyer, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, has developed a model that ingests MODIS observations of fires and combines them with other information about vegetation (such as the percentage of tree cover and the type of forest) to calculate the quantity of emissions.

In September 2012, Wiedinmyer used her model to calculate Russian fire emissions for every year dating back to 2002. She found that the amount of carbon monoxide produced in 2012 was significantly more than what was produced in 2010 and the second most in a decade. Through August 31, the model showed that Russian wildfires had released an estimated 48 teragrams of carbon monoxide since the beginning of 2012. By comparison, the model estimated fires yielded just 22 teragrams of carbon monoxide in all of 2010.

Only one year—2003—had higher overall emissions. In that year, when severe fires burned in eastern Russia, wildfires produced an estimated 72 teragrams of carbon monoxide.

References
- Wiedinmyer, C. (2011). The Fire Inventory from NCAR (FINN): a High Resolution Global Model to Estimate the Emissions from Open Burning. Geoscience Model Development.
- Vivhar, A. (2010, July 13). Wildfires in Russia in 2008-2008: Estimates of Burn Areas Using Satellite MODIS MCD45. Remote Sensing Letters.
- Langmann, B. (2009, July 13). Vegetation Fire Emissions and Their Impact on Air Pollution and Climate. Atmospheric Environment.

Further Reading
- Russian Government. (2012, August 6). Dmitry Medvedev on a Working Visit to the Tomsk Region Holds a Meeting on the Situation in the Constituent Entities of the Russian Federation Suffering from Abnormally High Temperatures in 2012.Accessed September 12, 2012.
- Russian Government. (2012, August 6). Dmitry Medvedev Holds a Meeting With Tomsk Region Governor Sergei Zhvachkin. Accessed September 12, 2012.
- Ranson, J. (2012, July). Siberia 2012: A Slow and Smoky Arrival. Notes from the Field.

NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Adam Voiland, with information from Christine Wiedinmyer, Jon Ranson, and Vyacheslav Kharuk. Instrument: Aqua - MODIS

Friday, June 22, 2012

Fires are raging again across Russia

NASA satellite image, acquired April 24, 2012

Back in April, thousands of hectares were burning when NASA captured above image of fires in a rural area north of Omsk, a city in south central Russia near the Kazakhstan border, according to the NASA report accompanying the image.

In May 6, 2012, the Voice of Russia reported some 11000 hectares (about 42.4 square miles) of forests in Siberia to be on fire.

Lena River, Siberia - Wikipedia

Earlier this month, eight Russian paratroopers died fighting a massive forest fire in southern Siberia, reports UPI.

Russia has now declared a state of emergency in several eastern regions, due to hundreds of wildfires, reports NASA.

Smoke from fires burning in Siberia can travel across the Pacific Ocean and into North America. A NASA analysis of satellite images shows that aerosols from fires took six days to reach America's shores. In certain cases they saw smoke that actually circles the globe, describes NASA.

These fires are causing a lot of emissions, including soot that can be deposited on the ice in the Arctic, resulting in more sunlight to be absorbed which will speed up the melt.

Furthermore, high temperatures in Siberia will warm up the water in rivers, causing warm water to flow into the Arctic, as illustrated by above Wikipedia image highlighting the Lena River and the August 3, 2010, satellite image below, showing warm river water heat up the Laptev Sea (degrees Celsius).

The image below was edited from a report by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, describing that the globally-averaged temperature for May 2012 marked the second warmest May since record keeping began in 1880.

NOAA image, temperature anomalies for May 2012

The image below was edited from a recent NASA report describing a total of 198 fires burning across Russia. As the inset shows, the fires on the main image are part of an area where further fires are raging.

NASA satellite image, acquired June 18, 2012

Below are two maps from the NOAA Climate Prediction Center, showing temperature anomalies in Southern Russia for the week from June 10th to 16th, 2012, of over 7 degrees Celsius (12.6 degrees Fahrenheit), with temperatures in areas around the Caspian Sea reaching over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).

Perhaps even more worrying than high temperatures in Southern Russia are high temperature anomalies in Northern Siberia, some of which were in the 16-18 degrees Celsius range for the week from June 10-16th, 2012 (see NOAA image below).