Exploring CO2 anomalies in Brazilian biomes combining OCO-2 & 3 data: Linkages to wildfires patterns

Abstract

Climate change is a challenge to the global community and one of the causes is the increase of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide (CO2). The major emission source of this gas into the atmosphere comes from the burning of fossil fuels and biomass burning, on the other hand, the main sink comes from biochemical processes such as photosynthesis. Thus, the observation of CO2 is a key point to understanding sources and sinks. In this context, The Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) and 3 (OCO-3), are a NASA dedicated mission to monitor the column-averaged dry-air mole fraction of carbon dioxide (XCO2) on a global scale. We combined the OCO-2 and OCO-3 observations to study the spatial distribution of XCO2 anomalies and how some of these anomalies are related to fire occurrence in the Brazilian Biomes during 2020 and 2021 considering two different seasons, Dry and Wet. The fire occurrence was obtained from Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) that provides the data from the Moderate-Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) product of active fires and thermal anomalies at Near-Real Time (MCD14DL, collection 6). The OCO-2/3 observations are affected by cloud formations in wet seasons, we observe that the dry period has more observations. The XCO2 anomaly values range from ∼ 7.0 ppm to −7.0 ppm and mostly positive anomalies occur in Amazon Biome, and this ecosystem has higher average values for all periods (∼0.9 ppm), compared to the other biomes. The fire occurrence was higher in dry periods, especially in 2020 when unprecedented fire outbreaks were registered in Brazil. The most affected biomes were Pantanal, Cerrado, and Amazon. XCO2 positive anomalies spatially agree with fire foci over some areas, and the correlation values between them ranged from 0.2 to 0.5 depending on the biome and season, and when considering observations with clouds the correlation is slightly higher. We point out for the first time the possibility of using OCO-2 and 3 combined, also, how positive XCO2 anomalies are related to fire occurrence in different ecosystems and periods, and the role of cloud detection in this relationship.