A selection of scientific papers which were presented at an international workshop held in Wengen, Switzerland, in September 1998. A number of state-of-the-art papers are presented, which discuss scientific, technological and socio-economic issues related to large forest fires which occur both in the tropics and in the extra-tropical regions. The book reports some of the most recent research conducted in the context of the large forest fires which occurred in South-East Asia, Australia, Brazil and Africa in late 1997 and early 1998; while essentially due to human interference, these particular fires appear to have been enhanced by the particularly strong El Nino episode which prevailed at that time. This interdisciplinary volume addresses a number of topics, in particular the contribution to climatic change by the greenhouse gases and aerosols emitted by large forest fires, the monitoring of fires both during and after combustion through satellite remote-sensing techniques, and numerical studies of the perturbation to the climate system using general circulation climate models.
1. Biomass burning and climate: an introduction; J.L. Innes. 2. Global Biomass Burning: A Case Study of the Gaseous and Particulate Emissions Released to the Atmosphere During the 1997 Fires in Kalimantan and Sumatra, Indonesia; J.S. Levine. 3. Modelling the Effect of Landuse Changes on Global Biomass Emissions; S.A. Ferguson, et al. 4. Direct effects of fire on the boreal forest carbon budget; E.S. Kasischke, et al. 5. The impact of biomass burning on the global budget of ozone and ozone precursors; C. Granier, et al. 6. Impact of the 1997 Indonesian fires on tropospheric ozone and its precursors; D.A. Hauglustaine, et al. 7. The Relationship Between Area Burned by Wildland Fire in Canada and Circulation Anomalies in the Mid-Troposphere; W.R. Skinner, et al. 8. Underestimation of GCM-calculated short-wave atmospheric absorption in areas affected by biomass burning; M. Wild. 9. Wildland Fire Detection from Space: Theory and Application; D.R. Cahoon, et al. 10. Climate and vegetation as driving factors in global fire activity; E. Dwyer, et al. 11. Modelling the impact of vegetation fires, detected from NOAA-AVHRR data, on tropospheric chemistry in Tropical Africa; D. Stroppiana, et al. 12. A rule-based system for burned area mapping in temperate and tropical regions using NOAA/AVHRR imagery; J.M.C. Pereira, et al. Fire regime sensitivity to global climate change: An Australian perspective; G.J. Cary, J.C.G. Banks. (Part contents).