Potential relationship between forest fire emission and fire severity

Fire is an important bridge between the earth surface and atmosphere change at once atmosphere and vegetation ecosystem significantly. By releasing tremendous aerosol particles and trace gases, forest fire becomes a major source of atmosphere composition and plays a critical role on regulating earth-atmosphere energy balance. By burning vegetation, forest fire greatly changes the forest structure, composition, biodiversity, and productivity. The extents of those impacts is strongly depended on fire severity and area. An indirect estimation of fire severity based on fire emission would be a proxy on assessing above impacts, especially under the context of climate changes. Particularly, fire regimes changes would induce great impacts on atmosphere, ecosystem and human being. This project focuses on the cold forest regions in north of Quebec and aims at the estimation of fire emission for current and future years using satellite remote sensing technology and model simulation. Specifically, satellite-derived fire radiative power (FRP) and vegetation water content which usually are ignored in the FRP-based emission will combined together for fire emission estimation. Sequentially, fire emission with other major variables (e.g. drought code) will be used to estimate fire severity information to establish a new approach for fire severity assessment. Based on this, fire emission will be also modeled for future years under climate change with the major drivers identified previously.