High aridity, above-normal day temperatures, clear sky conditions, and calm winds during this early stage of the summer season could be some of the related factors for the sudden spike in forest fire occurrences which was started by the southern India regions.
For almost a week, forest fires have been raging in the Coonoor forest range in the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu. Recently, the Indian Air Force deployed Mi-17 V5 helicopters to conduct Bambi Bucket operations that discharged 16,000 liters of water, joining the ongoing efforts by the state forest department to wet the wildfires.
Usually, forests in southern India are less prone to fires as the vegetation type is largely evergreen or semi-evergreen. On the contrary, the forests in Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Odisha, Northeast India, and Chhattisgarh , are mostly covered with dry deciduous forests, making them more vulnerable to fires during the period between November to June, this is stated in a report of the Forest Survey of India (FSI)
FSI estimates suggest that approximately 36 percent of India’s forests are prone to fires, of which about 4 percent are extremely prone. Some forest areas in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are fire-prone but within recent years, Tamil Nadu has been reporting wildfires in the forests. One of the main reasons this year is the above-average temperatures.
February ended up being extremely hot over the country, especially in southern India. The month was South India’s hottest since 1901 and so was January, which was the fifth warmest in over a century. For the last two months, the recorded maximum, minimum, and mean temperatures remained above normal over the southern states, building the heat load over the region much before the onset of the summer season. As a result, in these forests, there has been an early availability of dry biomass since the winter season itself.
Recently the India Meteorological Department (IMD) informed us about the Excess Heat Factor (EHF), a value that predicts the chances of a heatwave over the county, to be significantly higher than normal over western Andhra Pradesh and neighboring Karnataka region. Last week, the maximum temperatures touched 40 degrees Celsius, which was very unusual for mid-March.
In the absence of pre-monsoon rainfall and prevailing high temperatures, the IMD has classified almost all of southern India districts under ‘mild’ aridity, suggesting 75 percent of the district to be arid.
Over the rest of the country, during the past week, the FSI data noted the highest number of forest fires were reported from Mizoram (3,738), Manipur (1,702), Assam (1,647), Meghalaya (1,229), and Chhattisgarh (1,183). Satellite data of Monday, generated by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) tools, discovered that the forest fires have been on an uptick since early March along the Konkan belt in Maharashtra, south-coastal Gujarat along Gir Somnath and Porbandar, southern Rajasthan and adjoining south-western districts of Madhya Pradesh, most forest-covered areas of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. High EHF values prevailed also over interior Tamil Nadu, coastal and interior Odisha, and adjoining Jharkhand, says the IMD
