Ten-year analysis of the forest fire smoke in the Russian Far East

Abstract : Forest fires make large quantities of forest resources lost, and promote global warming. In the Russian Far East, since forest fires occur every year, they have had a great influence on the earth environment. Especially, the fire smoke influences the region where a forest fire doesn't occur because it extends more widely than a fire does. In this paper, we examined the extension of the distribution of the forest fire smoke in the Russian Far East for ten years from 1994 to 2003. We used 380 scenes of NOAA AVHRR. The smoke distribution and precipitation were compared about data as which the number of cases and the season of the fire occurrence were almost the same. As a result, the smoke distribution extended terribly when precipitation was a little. And, the influence of precipitation was greater than that of the fire occurrences. We analyzed the number of fire occurrences for ten years. We used 1185 scenes for the analysis. In 1998, precipitation was the least of ten years and there were a lot of fire occurrences. The generated fire smoke extends more widely because the number of fire occurrences increases when precipitation is a little. Therefore, precipitation is very sensitive factor when we monitor the environmental pollution by wide distribution of fire smoke. We examined the relation among the forest fire, smoke, and precipitation, and showed the importance role of precipitation.