Carbon emissions from the 2023 Canadian wildfires

Creators: Byrne, Brendan¹; Liu, Junjie^{1, 2}; Bowman, Kevin W.^{1, 3}; Pascolini-Campbell, Madeleine¹; Chatterjee, Abhishek¹; Pandey, Sudhanshu¹; Miyazaki, Kazuyuki¹; van der Werf, Guido R.⁴; Wunch, Debra⁵; Wennberg, Paul O.²; Roehl, Coleen M.²; Sinha, Saptarshi⁶

1. Jet Propulsion Lab
2. California Institute of Technology
3. University of California, Los Angeles
4. Wageningen University & Research
5. University of Toronto
6. Washington University in St. Louis

Abstract

The 2023 Canadian forest fires have been extreme in scale and intensity with more than seven times the average annual area burned compared to the previous four decades. Here, we quantify the carbon emissions from these fires from May to September 2023 on the basis of inverse modelling of satellite carbon monoxide observations. We find that the magnitude of the carbon emissions is 647 TgC (570–727 TgC), comparable to the annual fossil fuel emissions of large nations, with only India, China and the USA releasing more carbon per year. We find that widespread hot–dry weather was a principal driver of fire spread, with 2023 being the warmest and driest year since at least 1980. Although temperatures were extreme relative to the historical record, climate projections indicate that these temperatures are likely to be typical during the 2050s, even under a moderate climate mitigation scenario (shared socioeconomic pathway, SSP 2–4.5). Such conditions are likely to drive increased fire activity and suppress carbon uptake by Canadian forests, adding to concerns about the long-term durability of these forests as a carbon sink.

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Acknowledgement

The research carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, was under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High-End Computing programme through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames Research Center. Authors B.B., A.C., J.L. and K.B. acknowledge the support from NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory Science Team Program and the Carbon Monitoring System Program (grant no. NNH20ZDA001N-CMS). We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme, which, through its Working Group on Coupled Modelling, coordinated and promoted CMIP6. We thank the climate modelling groups for producing and making available their model output, the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for archiving the data and providing access and the many funding agencies who support CMIP6 and ESGF. GFAS is generated using Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service Information 2020; neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains. The East Trout Lake TCCON station is funded through an infrastructure grant from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (grant no. 35278) and the Ontario Research Fund (grant no. 35278). The Park Falls TCCON site was supported by NASA (grant no. 80NSSC22K1066). We thank J. L. Laughner for guidance with the TCCON data. We thank M. Hafer and A. Dyk for providing information on Canada’s managed land. And we thank L. Baskaran for help in rasterizing these data.

Contributions

B.B., J.L., K.W.B., M. P.-C., A.C. and S.P. conceptualized and designed the study. K.M. provided atmospheric CO production and OH estimates. G.R.v.d.W extended the GFED4.1s dataset for this experiment. D.W., P.O.W. and C.M.R. provided TCCON data. S.S. provided MERRA-2 reanalysis for the model. B.B. conducted the analysis and wrote the paper, with input from all authors.

Data Availability

The dataset produced for this study can be accessed at JPL Open Repository, https://doi.org/10.48577/jpl.V5GR9F.

Code Availability

The Python and Bash codes used in this study are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12709398).

Supplemental Material

Supplementary sections 1 and 2, Figs. 1–14, Tables 1–3 and references (PDF)

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