Ecoinformatics and Soil-Plant Formations - New Ecoinformatics Tools in Environmental Science: Applications and Decision-making - page 683

corresponds to 8.9 % of total global emissions of carbon due to biomass burning;
13.8 % of global CO emissions due to forest fires, and 12.4 % of global Global

emissions of methane due to fires. The contribution of forest fires in Russia con-

stituted 78 % of total emissions (19 % is the share of North America). The

contribution of peat-bog fires at Far East to carbon input to the atmosphere in the

fall of 1998 reached 40 TgC.
A relative impact of fires on the chemical composition of the troposphere was

weaker in the Northern Hemisphere, where the background CO content was greater
than in the Southern Hemisphere. The radiative forcing at the surface level reached
10 W m − 2 over most of the tropical Indian Ocean, and 150 W m − 2 in the regions of
forest

fires turned out to be an important factor of the
impact on the radiative regime in the tropics. About 700 TgC were emitted to the
atmosphere, which constituted 3

fires in Indonesia. Thus, forest

4 % of carbon supplies in the peat bogs of

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Indonesia. All this testi es to a necessity of a detailed analysis of consequences of

forest fires and search of strategy of their control. One of the perspective which

approaches to solution of this problem is the use of satellite systems with micro-
wave radiometers, which will make it possible to control, on global scales, the
moisture content of forest and to determine thereby the level of their

fire risk.

8.4.3 Biomass Burning and Atmospheric Chemistry

Biomass burning is one of the most substantial sources of the input of many GHGs
to the atmosphere. This process takes place both during a forest fire and in burning

the wood remains when logging or in agriculture. Therefore the control of
the seasonal and inter-annual variability of biomass burning is important for the
estimation of GHGs emissions and the calculation of radiation budget variability.
Duncan et al. (2003) proposed a method of control with the use of the satellite
scanning radiometer ASTR. The results of measurements in the period 1979 2000

in south-western Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico, Central America,
Canada, Alaska, and the Asian part of Russia did not reveal any long-term trend of
CO emissions in forest

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fires, but revealed a clear inter-annual variability. The
annual volume of CO emission in the indicated regions changes from 2 (the Asian
part of Russia and China) to 20 Tg year − 1 (Indonesia and Malaysia) with average

total emissions of 437 TgC year − 1

global (annual values varied from 429 to

565 TgC year − 1 ).
In 1987, in the USA the long-term program was launched to study the spatial-
temporal variability of CO concentration in the troposphere. Initial air samples
taken in the marine atmospheric boundary layer to analyze the concentration of CO 2
and methane were also used to measure the CO concentration. During the last
decade, the scientists of the NOAA Climate Modeling and Diagnostics Laboratory
carried out an analysis of air samples to estimate the CO concentration from the
data of observations at the global network. It follows from the results obtained that
the short-term periods of increasing or decreasing CO concentration were