The fires that raged across southern Africa this Augustand September produced a thick "river of smoke" over theregion. NASA-supported studies currently underway on the event willcontribute to improved air pollution policies in the region and a betterunderstanding of its impact on climate change.
This year the southern African fire season peaked in early September.The region is subject to some of the highest levels of biomass burningin the world. The heaviest burning was in western Zambia, southernAngola, northern Namibia, and northern Botswana. Some of the blazes hadfire fronts 20 miles long that lasted for days.
In this animation, multiple fires are burning across the southernpart of the African continent in September 2000. The fires, indicatedin red, were observed by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer(AVHRR) instrument on board the NOAA-14 satellite. The fires generatedlarge amounts of heat-absorbing aerosols (the dark haze), which wereobserved with the Earth Probe Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS)instrument.
These observations were collected as part of a NASA-supported fieldcampaign called SAFARI 2000 (Southern African Regional ScienceInitiative). The recent six-week "dry-season" portion of thisexperiment was planned to coincide with the annual fires. SAFARI 2000planners tracked the changing location of fires with daily satellitemaps provided by researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space FlightCenter.
"Every year African biomass burning greatly exceeds the scale ofthe fires seen this year in the western United States," says RobertSwap of the University of Virginia, one of the campaign organizers.quot;But the southern African fire season we just observed may turn outto be an extreme one even by African standards. It was amazing howquickly this region went up in flames."
The thick haze layer from these fires was heavier than campaignparticipants had seen in previous field studies in the Amazon Basin andduring the Kuwati oil fires. The haze aerosols sampled were moreheat-absorbing than expected, which means the haze layer may have asignificant warming influence on the region’s atmosphere.
For more information, see the press release
References & Resources
Image courtesy NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Science Visualization Studio
