FRP Power Law Distribution of Forest Fires in China
Casanova, JoséLuis1; Salvador, Pablo2; Sanz, Julia2; Rodriguez, Javier2
1University of Valldolid-LATUV, SPAIN; 2LATUV-UVA, SPAIN

Recent research indicates that satellite FRP retrievals over individual burned areas and fires have power law distributions (Wooster and Zhang, 2004; Roberts et al., 2005; Roberts and Wooster, 2008]. In order to evaluate the power law parameters, more than 330,000 forest fires over all China from 2000 to 2012 have been analyzed. The forest fire data were obtained from MODIS Terra sensor and were taken from FIRMS, Fire Information For Resource Management System. This analysis has been applied to different geographical areas: first all China, and after that, we have split the territory into three areas: Northeast, Southeast and the rest of China. Also, the forest fires have been classified taking into account the different land cover uses where they occurred. The land cover classes have been obtained from Globcover. These land cover classes have been clustered in three groups: Rain fed croplands, Mosaic cropland and Mosaic vegetation; the second group includes all the forest classes, and finally the third group is composed by Mosaic forest or shrub land, Mosaic grassland, Closed to open broadleaved or needle leaved, evergreen or deciduous shrub land , Closed to open herbaceous vegetation and Sparse vegetation. The better results were obtained for Northeast and Southeast areas and for all the different land classes. In all the cases the r2 coefficients were better than 0,95. The coefficients for all China and the rest of China areas were a bit lower, around 0,75. Typically the most frequent FRP is between 10-12 MW, but in the case of the fires in Northeast China forest, group 2, it rises till 20 MW. The analysis also shows that the fit parameters are different from different areas and different land classes. In summary, the obtained results confirm the forest fires in China have power law distributions. All these results will allow us to get the FRE from China forest fires, only having sparse satellite observations. BIBLIOGRAPHY Wooster, M. J., and Y. H. Zhang (2004), Boreal forest fires burn less intensely in Russia than in North America, Geophys. Res. Lett., 31, Roberts, G. J., M. J. Wooster, G. L. W. Perry, N. Drake, L. M. Rebelo, and F. Dipotso (2005), Retrieval of biomass combustion rates and totals from fire radiative power observations: Application to southern Africa using geostationary SEVIRI imagery, J. Geophys. Res., 110, Roberts, G. J., and M. J. Wooster (2008), Fire Detection and Fire Characterization Over Africa Using Meteosat SEVIRI, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote Sens., 46(4), 1200–1218.