With support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Science and Environmental Conservation programs, UC Irvine's Department of Earth System Science has worked to develop a system for forecasting fire season severity and droughts in several tropical forest and savanna regions, based on satellite measurements and computer modeling.
Together with researchers at NASA, the scientists at UC Irvine have used that system to issue their annual fire forecast for 2015, this year finding that "fire risk for South America's Amazon Basin in 2015 will fall along an east-west divide. According to their model, based on multiple satellite datasets, the forests of the western Amazon will experience average or below-average fire risk, while those in the eastern Amazon will see above-average risk."
Read the full press release here.
Image: Blue colors show above average ground and surface water and red colors show below average ground and surface water, in April 2015. The east/west pattern supports the projections of more fires in the drier east and fewer fires in the wet west.
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