Fires in Siberian forests, which burn 10–14 × 10⁶ ha annually, emit 3–10 × 10⁶ t of smoke particulates. The fine particles of 0.1–5 μm in size remain in the air for a long time, and absorb and scatter solar radiation, resulting, possibly, in weather and climatic change.

Prescribed burning may mitigate carbon emissions from unplanned fires. This requires an ‘outlay’ of carbon emissions to achieve a future ‘saving’ from reduced wildfire activity. Modelling for Australian eucalypt forests suggests that an overall net saving of carbon emissions may be difficult to achieve, in contrast to Australian tropical savannas.

Satellite-derived measurements were used to compare prescribed fires and wildfires with respect to intensity and smoke plume area for the regions around the Australian cities of Melbourne and Sydney. Both fire types formed a continuum of intensity and plume size. We suggest that overall smoke plume area from the landscape is substantially smaller from prescribed than from wildfires.

We estimated the total carbon release emitted from forest fires in Japan over a 30-year period. While carbon emission varied widely from year to year based on the area burnt, it decreased dramatically from the 1980s onward and was substantially lower than the mean annual net primary production of Japanese forests and carbon releases in other countries and regions.

Approaches for reporting on forest fire-related greenhouse gas emissions in southern Europe were experimentally applied to estimate burnt biomass in forest fire events occurring in Italy during 2008–2010. A reliable range of biomass loss can be derived by methods able to assess variability of local fire effects across different forest types.

This study presents and tests an integrated wildfire smoke prediction system formed by coupling WRF-Sfire, a weather research forecast system plus surface fire behaviour model, with the chemical transport model WRF-Chem. The coupled WRF-Sfire-Chem aims to predict pyro-plume development, and smoke dispersion and its air quality impacts, by comprehensively modelling fire spread, heat release during flaming combustion, fire emissions and fire plume rise, as well as downwind smoke dispersion and associated chemistry.