Joint Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Various Wildfire and Drought Indicators in Indonesia

Abstract

Wildfires are well known as annual disasters in Indonesia. More than 3 million ha was burned in the last 5 years. During an extreme event such as in 2019, carbon emissions can cause smog disasters in neighboring countries such as Malaysia and Singapore. Though difficult to predict, many hotspots that appear can be used to indicate the emergence of large-scale wildfires. The objective of this research is to provide suggestions in terms of used variables when analyzing fire event indication (hotspot), fire event scale (burned area), and fire event impact (carbon emissions). This research provides a spatio-temporal analysis and dependency between drought (precipitation and its derivative variables) and fire indicators (hotspot, burned area, and carbon emission). This research provides the different characteristics of each indicator when used to find joint patterns of burned areas, hotspots, and carbon emissions. Overall, using potential evapotranspiration and precipitation to calculate climate water balance gives great results in all analysis. Precipitation anomalies give the best joint spatial pattern to describe wildfire events in the area with monsoonal rainfall. Meanwhile, precipitation gives better results by capturing more wildfire events in a temporal pattern, even on robust analysis.