Black forest fire5/5/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() These included 205 forest fires with an average area of 584 km 2 and 186 non-forest fires with an average area of 445 km 2 63 of the forest fires took place in southeast (SE) Australia (the area between Fraser Island, Queensland, and Kangaroo Island, South Australia), with an average area of 1097 km 2. Altogether, 391 large fires were identified for Australia’s Black Summer. We also computed more than 30 climatic, vegetation and anthropogenic variables based on remotely sensed derived variables, climatic time series and land cover datasets, which served as the explanatory variables. For each of the wildfires, we calculated the following 10 response variables, which served as proxies for the fires’ extent in space and time, spread and intensity: fire area, fire duration (days), the average spread of fire (area/days), fire radiative power (FRP as detected by NASA’s MODIS Collection 6 active fires product (MCD14ML)), two burn severity products, and changes in vegetation as a result of the fire (as calculated using the vegetation health index (VHI) derived from AVHRR and VIIRS as well as live fuel moisture content (LFMC), photosynthetic vegetation (PV) and combined photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic vegetation (PV+NPV) derived from MODIS). We used a segmentation algorithm to define individual polygons of large fires based on the burn date from NASA’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) active fires product and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) burnt area product (MCD64A1). ![]() To this end, we studied all large forest and non-forest fires (>100 km 2) that burnt in Australia between September 2019 and mid-February 2020 (Australia’s Black Summer fires), focusing on the forest fires in southeast Australia. Our aim in this study was to examine the factors that have led some of the wildfires to burn over larger areas for a longer duration and to cause more damage to vegetation. This extensive fire season has been attributed to the global climate crisis, a long drought season and extreme fire weather conditions. The summer season of 2019–2020 has been named Australia’s Black Summer because of the large forest fires that burnt for months in southeast Australia, affecting millions of Australia’s citizens and hundreds of millions of animals and capturing global media attention. ![]()
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