# Editorial: Observations and modelling of recent extreme
wild fire events and their impact on the environment
and climate

Corinna Kloss, Pasquale Sellitto, Christoph Rüdiger, Solène Turquety

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Corinna Kloss, Pasquale Sellitto, Christoph Rüdiger, Solène Turquety. Editorial: Observations and modelling of recent extreme wild fire events and their impact on the environment and climate. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 2023, 10, pp.1123727. 10.3389/fenvs.2022.1123727. hal-04273492

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EDITED AND REVIEWED BY
Hong Liao,
Nanjing University of Information Science
and Technology, China

*CORRESPONDENCE
Corinna Kloss,
✉ corinna.kloss@cnrs-orleans.fr
Pasquale Sellitto,
✉ pasquale.sellitto@lisa.ipsl.fr
Christoph Rüdiger,
✉ Christoph.Rüdiger@bom.gov.au
Solène Turquety,
✉ solene.turquety@lmd.ipsl.fr

SPECIALTY SECTION
This article was submitted
to Atmosphere and Climate,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Environmental Science

RECEIVED 14 December 2022

ACCEPTED 19 December 2022

PUBLISHED 09 January 2023

**CITATION**
Kloss C, Sellitto P, Rüdiger C and Turquety S (2023), Editorial: Observations and modelling of recent extreme wild fire events and their impact on the environment and climate.
*Front. Environ. Sci.* 10:1123727.
doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2022.1123727

COPYRIGHT
© 2023 Kloss, Sellitto, Rüdiger and Turquety. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

# Editorial: Observations and modelling of recent extreme wild fire events and their impact on the environment and climate

Corinna Kloss<fnref n="1" />*, Pasquale Sellitto<fnref n="2" />,³*, Christoph Rüdiger⁴* and Solène Turquety⁵*

KEYWORDS

extreme wildfire, climate impact, environmental impact, observations, modelling

Editorial on the Research Topic

Observations and Modelling of Recent Extreme Wild Fire Events and their Impact on the Environment and Climate

Anthropogenic climate change is known to increase the average global surface mean temperature, intensity of heatwaves, and decrease surface humidity and soil moisture (Pörtner et al., 2022). In a Science Brief Review, Smith et al. (2020) reveal the significant correlation between those factors, i.e. the occurrence of what is called “extreme fire weather” (Jain et al., 2022) and the already occurring increase in extent and frequency of wild fires. Through increased fire intensities, “mega fires” can develop, with particularly severe impacts on the atmosphere, environment, and climate. Some examples of mega fires during the past 5 years are:

* The British Columbia (Canada) fires from June/July 2017 with around 1,200,000 ha burned

* The Siberian fires (Russia) from July 2019 with 3,000,000 ha burned

* The Australian fires from September 2019 to February 2020 with 24,300,000 ha burned

* The Pantanal rainforest fires (in Brazil) from January to August 2020 with around 380,000 ha burned and

* The California (United States of America) wildfires from June/July 2021 with around 1,000,000 ha burned

All of the above-mentioned fires are associated with unusually long preceding drought phases alongside very low rainfall quantities and favoring conditions for the outbreak of extreme wildfires such as high winds. Those incidences generate unprecedented case studies in terms of their impacts, including environmental hazards such as implications for the ecosystems, animal biodiversity and air pollution through large areas burned. In addition, extreme fires can develop intense pyro-convection with possible upper-tropospheric injections or even stratospheric overshoots. Through stratospheric injections, biomass burning gaseous and aerosol pollutants can impact globally and over long time periods. Stratospheric biomass burning plumes can have significant

<footnote n="1">¹Laboratoire de Physique de l'Environnement et de l'Espace, CNRS/Université d'Orléans, Orléans, France,</footnote>

<footnote n="2">²Laboratoire Interuniversitaire des Systèmes Atmosphériques, Univ. Paris Est Créteil and Université de Paris,</footnote>

<footnote>CNRS, Institut Pierre Simon Laplace, Créteil, France, ³Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia,</footnote>

<footnote>Osservatorio Etneo, Catania, Italy, ⁴Bureau of Meteorology, Docklands, VIC, Australia, ⁵Faculté des Sciences</footnote>

<footnote>et Ingénierie, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France</footnote>
impacts on the radiative balance and the climate system. The self-
rising feature, driven by radiative heating of absorbing biomass
burning aerosols in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere
(shown, e.g., for the aerosol plume of the 2017 British Columbia
fires in Yu et al. (2019), for example, promotes a longer lifetime of
aerosols in the stratosphere and thus a longer radiative impact
compared to aerosol plumes originating from volcanic eruptions.
The impact on climate of the 2019/2020 Australian fires has been
the strongest ever recorded for wildfire events, comparable with the
impact of moderate volcanic eruptions (e.g. from the Raikoke
eruption in June 2019; Sellitto et al. (2022)). The intensity of
these events have been of unprecedented consequences, such as
significant H₂O anomalies at altitudes beyond 25 km (Kablick et al.,
2020), mainly due to the severity of the fires and the level of energy
emitted (Li et al., 2021).

This Research Topic aims to provide a platform for
environmental and climatic impact studies of extreme fire
events of the past few years, including studies of the impact on
the atmospheric composition and regional air quality, as well as
studies validating the methodology of retrievals and observations
of fire-related parameters. Published studies within this Research
Topic deal with environmental aspects of most of the intense
wildfires of the past 2 years and give an overall overview of
extreme fire events back to 2014. The broad scale effects of
wildfires to peatlands in North America (2014/2015) under
extreme drought conditions is studied in Bourgeau-Chavez et al.
The impact of the Siberian fires in 2019 is discussed in Ansmann
et al., the Australian fires 2019/2020 in Kloss et al. and the origin
and distribution of the Pantanal fires in Brazil in 2020 is discussed
in De Magalhaes et al. The four studies together cover a broad range
of research fields, studying the atmospheric impact, examining the
accuracy of satellite observation classifications, analyzing the burn
severity and its association with human and climate factors.

Bourgeau-Chavez et al. studied 136 fire events and their
respective effects on the hydrology and ecosystem functions of
boreal peatlands, using their own developed Landsat-8 algorithm,
to map severity of burn to the organic soil layers. They find that
peatlands on the Taiga shield are more susceptible to wildfire
events than those on the Taiga plains as they are smaller and
hydrologically more isolated by the rocky landscape, as opposed to
the hydrologically well-connected peatlands in the plains. As a
consequence of the fires, the spatial diversity of the smaller
peatlands in the shield may be reduced due to the relatively
large area affected by more such extensive fires.

Ansmann et al. find methodological limitations of the aerosol
speciation scheme algorithm from Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and
Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIOP) space-borne
observations. With ground-based lidar observations they identify a
stratospheric smoke aerosol plume, while CALIOP observations of
the same plume were classified purely consisting of sulfate aerosols.
This misclassification of CALIOP observations might have led to an

overestimated impact of the volcanic eruption (at Raikoke in June
2019) and underestimated stratospheric impact of the Siberian fires
in July 2019, respectively.

Kloss et al. investigate aerosol and trace gas plumes, originating from the Australian fires (2019/2020) and their respective transport around the globe in the free atmosphere. They show that the Australian fires already had a significant impact on the global free atmosphere, starting from September 2019, before the spectacular stratospheric injection *via* pyro-convection during the turn of the year 2019/2020.

De Magalhaes et al. explain the link between climate and human
factors and the burn severity of the Pantanal fires (in South America in
2020). They show that most (~80%) of the fire outbreak occurred close
(< 10 km) to areas with human activities. Furthermore, they find that
favorable climate conditions (e.g., with a drought index <-2.6)
enhanced the irreversible fire spread. This underlines the
relationship between human activities (in this case expansion
through road networks) into natural ecosystems and the increase of
fire occurrences in such regions.

All together, the studies within this Research Topic emphasize the impact of extreme fire events on the global atmosphere, climate and its link to the regional ecosystem. They furthermore show that some caution is necessary when working with pre-classified space-borne observations and give concrete concern about road expansion projects (as in the Pantanal natural region), which may increase the risk for future fire events.

With increasing frequency and severity of wildfires with global
warming, this Research Topic will remain of high importance and
actuality for the coming decades.

Author contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual
contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the
absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be
construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors
and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations,
or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product
that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its
manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
References

Jain, P., Castellanos-Acuna, D., Coogan, S. C. P., Abatzoglou, J. T., and Flannigan, M. D. (2022). Observed increases in extreme fire weather driven by atmospheric humidity and temperature. *Nat. Clim. Change* 12, 63–70. doi:10.1038/s41558-021-01224-1

Kablick, G. P., III, Allen, D. R., Fromm, M. D., and Nedoluha, G. E. (2020). Australian pyrocb smoke generates synoptic-scale stratospheric anticyclones. *Geophys. Res. Lett.* 47, e2020GL088101. doi:10.1029/2020gl088101

Li, F., Zhang, X., and Kondragunta, S. (2021). Highly anomalous fire emissions from the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires. *Environ. Res. Commun.* 3, 105005. doi:10.1088/2515-7620/ac2e6f

Pörtner, H.-O., Roberts, D., Tignor, M., Poloczanska, E., Mintenbeck, K., Alegría, A., et al. (2022). *Climate change 2022: Impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Contribution of*

*working group II to the sixth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sellitto, P., Belhadji, R., Kloss, C., and Legras, B. (2022). Radiative impacts of the Australian bushfires 2019–2020 – part 1: Large-scale radiative forcing. *Atmos. Chem. Phys.* 22, 9299–9311. doi:10.5194/acp-22-9299-2022

Smith, A. J. P., Jones, M. W., Abatzoglou, J. T., Canadell, J. G., and Betts, R. A. (2020). *Climate change increases the risk of wildfires: September 2020*. ScienceBrief.

Yu, P., Toon, O. B., Bardeen, C. G., Zhu, Y., Rosenlof, K. H., Portmann, R. W., et al. (2019). Black carbon lofts wildfire smoke high into the stratosphere to form a persistent plume. *Science* 365, 587–590. doi:10.1126/science.aax1748