Sensitivity of biomass burning emissions estimates to land surface information

Abstract. Emissions from biomass burning (BB) are a key source of atmospheric tracer gases that affect the atmospheric carbon cycle. We estimated four types of global BB emissions using a bottom-up approach and by combining the remote sensing products related to fire distribution with two aboveground biomass (AGB) and two land cover classification (LCC) distributions. The sensitivity of the estimates of BB emissions to the AGB and LCC data was evaluated using the carbon monoxide (CO) emissions associated with each BB estimate. We found a substantial spatial difference in CO emissions for both the AGB and LCC data, which resulted in a large (factor of approximately three) spread of estimates for the mean annual CO emissions. We simulated atmospheric CO variability using an atmospheric tracer transport model and the BB emissions estimates and compared it with ground-based and satellite observations. At ground-based observation sites during fire seasons, statistical comparisons indicated that the impact of differences in the BB emissions estimates on atmospheric CO variability was poorly defined in our simulations. However, when compared at the regional and global scales, the distribution of atmospheric CO concentrations in the simulations show substantial differences among the estimates of BB emissions. These results indicate that the estimates of BB emissions are highly sensitive to the AGB and LCC data.