Just Accepted

This article has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication. It is in production and has not been edited, so may differ from the final published form.

GAMBUT field measurement of emissions from a tropical peatland fire experiment: from ignition to spread to suppression

Yuqi Hu, Thomas Smith, Muhammad Santoso, Hafiz Amin, Eirik Christensen, Wuquan Cui, Dwi Purnomo, Yulianto Nugroho , Guillermo Rein

Abstract

Background: Accurate quantification of emissions from peatland wildfire, a significant contributor to global climate change and transboundary haze, is crucial for understanding their feedback to the atmospheric and Earth system. However, current knowledge on this topic is limited to a few laboratory and field studies, which report substantial variability in terms of the fire emission factors (EFs). Aims: We aim to understand how emissions vary across the life-cycle of a peatland fire. Methods: In August/September 2018, we conducted the largest and longest to-date field-scale experimental burn on a tropical peatland in Sumatra, Indonesia. Field measurements of gas emissions from the fire experiment were conducted using an open-path Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to retrieve mole fractions of 11 gas species. Key results: We calculated and reported EFs from 40 measurement sessions conducted over two weeks of burning, encompassing different fire stages (e.g., ignition, smouldering spread, and suppression) and weather events (e.g., rainfall) for the first time. Our findings provide field evidence to indicate that EFs vary significantly among fire stages and weather events. We also observed that the heterogeneous physicochemical properties of peatland site (e.g., moisture content) influenced the EFs. Furthermore, we found that modified combustion efficiency was highly sensitive to complex field variables and could introduce large uncertainties when determining the regimes of a peat fire. Conclusions and Implications: We call for further studies to investigate peat fire emissions, and for more comprehensive mapping of peatland heterogeneity and land-use for emissions inventories, accounting for spatial and temporal variability in EFs since the initiation of a fire event

WF23079  Accepted 05 August 2024

© CSIRO 2024