Emissions from Forest Fires: Methods of Estimation and National Results - The Greenhouse Gas Balance of Italy - page 87

6.5 Fire Emission Historical Trends and Future Scenarios

A crucial point to support emissions inventories and modeling of air quality and
climate change issues has been recognized in up-to-date, accurate, and consistent
FE estimates (Battye and Battye 2002 ; Granier et al. 2011 ). In addition, the spatial
distribution pattern quantification is decisive for several applications, including air
quality management plans, and emission source models coupled with dispersion
models and decision support systems (Bacciu et al. 2012 ).
Over the past decades, a number of inventories, both at global and regional
scale, were developed to estimate gaseous and particulate species emissions from
forest fires. Earlier studies (e.g. Crutzen and Andreae 1990 ; Hao et al. 1990 ;
Galanter et al. 2000 ) made use of biome-averaged fuel load and fire return times,
while the latest inventories used satellite remote-sensing data to derive burned area
or active fires, often combined with biogeochemical models (e.g. Hoelzemann
et al. 2004 ; Ito and Penner 2004 ; van der Werf et al. 2006 , 2010 ).
In this section, some new inventories (Tables 6.2 and 6.3 ) were analyzed with
the aim to give an overview of the historical trends, as well as future scenarios of
FE in Italy.

Table 6.2 Long-period FE inventories description
Inventory RETRO EDGAR4.2

1960-2000 1970-2008

Time coverage

Time
resolution

Monthly Yearly

0.5° 0.5°

Grid size

National statistics; GBA2000; ATSR
fire pixels

(1970-1996) RETRO; Fire counts
(1997-2000) ATSR; Fire counts
(2001 onwards) MODIS; Burned area
(2001 onwards) MODIS

Fire

Shultz et al. ( 2008 ) EC 2011

Reference

Table 6.3 Monthly based fire emission inventories description
Inventory Time

coverage

Time
resolution

Grid
size

Fire product Reference

GFED3 1997-2010 M 0.5° ATSR, VIRS, and

MODIS

van der Werf et al.
( 2010 )

1900-2005 D/M 1.0° GBA2000, ATSR, his-

torical reconstruction of
BA from Mouillot and
Field ( 2005 )

Mieville et al. ( 2010 )

GICC

1997-2005 M 1.0° ATSR, VIRS, and

MODIS

van der Werf et al.
( 2006 )

GFED2

GUESS-ES 1997-2009 M 1.0° GFED3 Burned

area, L3JRC from
SPOT-VEGEATION

Knorr et al. ( 2011 )