How much carbon dioxide was released during the Australian wildfires?

A fire emission study on the latest fires that ravaged Southeast Australia

A few days ago I spoke to a friend about how remote sensing data could be used to validate emission inventories on a national and local scale (related posts to come). He runs a small consulting firm that creates greenhouse gas inventories for clients, and we talked about the role that high-resolution earth observation data could play in validating these reports.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look up older studies that might have done this in the past and came across a paper that was published by Nature just a few days ago.

It’s called “Vast CO2 release from Australian fires in 2019–2020 constrained by satellite” and is focused on quantifying the amount of carbon dioxide released from the horrific Australian wildfires last year. This study used carbon monoxide measurements from TROPOMI along with emission factors and fire inventory products to estimate the carbon dioxide emissions.