Monitoring of forest fires in far east Russia

Forest fires result in loss of large quantities of forest resources, and promote global warming. In far east Russia, forest fires occur every year, and greatly influence the Earth´s environment. The temporal analysis of NOAA AVHRR images is effective for monitoring the global change. We analyzed a number of hot spots and aerosols using NOAA AVHRR images for ten years in far east Russia. The year with most hot spots was 1998 and the generating places of the fires were seashore parts. Most fires occurred in summer every year. Since a lot of smoke occurs in a hot spot, the quantity of aerosol has also increased in summer. There were few hot spots in June 1998 because there was much precipitation. We consider that there is a correlation between the precipitation and the number of hot spots, because precipitation in 1998 was less than an average year and the number of hot spots was more than an average year.