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Published September 21, 2024 | Version 1.1
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Largest wildfires in Angola: Correlation of vegetation and meteorological variables with wildfire intensity

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Freie Universität Berlin
  • 2. ROR icon Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Physiology
  • 3. Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
  • 4. ROR icon Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences
  • 5. ROR icon Technical University of Munich

Description

Wildfires have significant impacts on biodiversity and their effects have been exacerbated in recent times by global warming. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between wildfire intensity and meteorological variables as a function of vegetation type in Angola, focusing on the largest wildfires in 2020. We used the Globfire, MODIS Surface Reflectance, ERA5-Land, and CHIRPS data to analyze wildfire severity measured by its differenced normalized burn ratio (dNBR), duration, and burnt area, and their correlations with normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), temperature, precipitation, and wind speed. Our results show significant positive correlations between all measures of fire severity. In general, wildfire severity was positively correlated with pre-fire NDVI and, except for forests, negatively correlated with wind speed. Future studies can build on these results to develop predictive models for mitigation and rapid response to wildfires.

 

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Additional details

Related works

Is referenced by
Presentation: https://youtu.be/KJkgIhMwrvc?feature=shared (URL)

Funding

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
An Open, Community Supported, Accessible Summer School for Climate Science 80NSSC23K0835

Dates

Submitted
2024-04-26

Software

Programming language
Python

References

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