South American fires predicted by El Nino, Science Magazine study Nov. 2011

11/11/11, "Amazon fire season 'linked to ocean temperature'," BBC, by Mark Kinver

"Sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies can help predict the severity of Amazon fire seasons, a study has suggested.

A team of US scientists found there was a correlation between El Nino patterns in the Pacific

• and fire activity in the eastern Amazon.

Writing in the journal Science, they say they also found a link between Atlantic SST changes and fires in southern areas of South America.

They said the data could help produce forecasts of forthcoming fire seasons.

"We found that the Oceanic Nino Index (ONI) was correlated with interannual fire activity in the eastern Amazon, whereas the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) index was more closely

• linked with fires in the southern and south-western Amazon," they wrote.

The ONI is a system used to identify El Nino (warm) and La Nina (cool) events in the Pacific Ocean,

• while the AMO index performs a similiar function in the Atlantic."...

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11/11/11, "Forecasting Fire Season Severity in South America Using Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies," Science

1. "Yang Chen¹,*,
2. James T. Randerson¹,
3. Douglas C. Morton²,
4. Ruth S. DeFries³,
5. G. James Collatz²,
6. Prasad S. Kasibhatla⁴,
7. Louis Giglio⁵,
8. Yufang Jin¹,
9. Miriam E. Marlier^6"

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