Project Overview

The Fire-Land-Atmosphere Modeling and Evaluation for Southeast Asia (FLAMES) Project is a collaboration between researchers in the Departments of Geography and Statistics at The Ohio State University. The project is funded by NASA's Research Opportunities for Space and Earth Science (ROSES-2005 Award #NNG06GD31G) as part of the Land-Cover/Land-Use Change Program and is endorsed by the Global Land Project, a joint research agenda of the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP).

Scientists and policy makers have become increasingly concerned about the implications of the consistent brown haze covering Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean in terms of human health and climate change. The emergence of this haze is due to increased atmospheric concentrations of carbonaceous aerosols, or small airborne particles, over the region. A large portion of these carbonaceous aerosols are generated by anthropogenic activities, including both shifting/swidden agriculture and fossil fuel combustion. This research project seeks to develop methodology to determine the relative contribution of these two types of emissions to the total aerosol burden over the region. The statistical component of the project involves the development of a framework for modeling the spatio-temporal dependence structure of regional carbonaceous aerosol concentration, given atmospheric circulation processes and observed fire occurrence. This modeling framework will be used to synthesize a variety of types of data including remote sensing imagery from the MISR and MODIS instruments onboard the Terra and Aqua satellites, output from simulation-based weather and aerosol transport models, and estimates of biomass emission for various vegetation types. This framework will ultimately be integrated into a web-based system that will allow users to forecast aerosol distributions under various environmental and land-use related policy scenarios.