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Jos de Laat, senior scientist at KNMI and lead-author, said, “We studied an area of around 4 million sq km, where the most intense fires and pollution were concentrated near the Brazil-Bolivia border. This had severe air quality impacts across the region.
“We found significant gaps between modelled and observed levels of air pollution. Current methods cannot reproduce what satellites are actually seeing, suggesting that important sources of emissions are being missed.”
To address this, researchers trained an AI system to accelerate their advanced emission calculations. This made it possible to analyse multiple years and regions despite the high computational demands.
The research also combined data from several Sentinel missions (Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3 as well as Sentinel-5P) to improve both the estimation and evaluation of wildfire emissions, noting that the synergy of these instruments is crucial for progress.
Carbon monoxide as a proxy for carbon dioxide
Carbon monoxide is a colourless, odourless and toxic gas that is released when organic matter such as vegetation burns incompletely. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is the biggest contributor to anthropogenic emissions. Smoke plumes from wildfires contain both gases.
However, carbon monoxide is easier for satellites to detect than carbon dioxide, making it a useful proxy for estimating wildfire emissions.
While carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas, it is already naturally present in the atmosphere at high and almost constant concentrations (around 430 parts per million, or ppm) making small changes difficult to detect from space – a bit like trying to see a piece of white paper on snow. Carbon monoxide, in contrast, naturally exists at much lower levels (less than 0.2 ppm) and is much more variable, so increases are easier to spot, more like looking for a piece of white paper against a dark background.