Surface albedo darkening from wildfires in northern sub-Saharan Africa

Abstract

Northern sub-Saharan Africa (NSSA) has a wide variety of climate zones or biomes, where albedo dynamics are highly coupled with vegetation dynamics and fire disturbances. Quantifying surface albedo variations due to fire disturbances on time scales of several months to several years is complex and is made worse by lack of accurate and spatially consistent surface albedo data. Here, we estimate the surface albedo effect from wildfires in different land cover types in the NSSA region using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) multi-year observational data (2003–11). The average decrease in albedo after fires at the scale of 1 km MODIS footprint is −0.002 02 ± 0.000 03 for woody savanna and −0.002 22 ± 0.000 03 for savanna. These two land cover types together account for >86% of the total MODIS fire count between 2003 and 2011. We found that only a small fraction of the pixels (≦̸10%) burn in two successive years and about 47% had any fire recurrence in 9 years. The study also derived the trajectories of post-fire albedo dynamics from the percentages of pixels that recover to pre-fire albedo values each year. We found that the persistence of surface albedo darkening in most land cover types in the NSSA region is limited to about 6–7 years, after which at least 99% of the burnt pixels recover to their pre-fire albedo. Our results provide critical information for deriving necessary input to various models used in determining the effects of albedo change due to wild fires in the NSSA region.

Keywords

• surface albedo
• wildfires
• sub-Saharan Africa
• MODIS
• biomass burning
• albedo recovery