Análise multifractal de séries temporais de focos de calor no Brasil

Abstract

Vegetation and forest fires affect millions of hectares of Brazilian land and have severe ecological, social and economic consequences, including emissions of green house gases, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion etc. To establish efficient methods for prevention and suppression of fires, which is crucial for preservation of environment, it is necessarily to know the spatial location and time of occurrence of fires, burned area, why they occur, and how they initiate and propagate. Several satellite systems are currently available for monitoring different fire characteristics: dry areas that are susceptible to fire, actively flaming fires, burned area and smoke, and trace gas emissions. Hot pixels are satellite image pixels with infrared intensity corresponding to burning vegetation. Depending of image resolution, a hot pixel may represent one fire, or a part of a larger fire. Together with other satellite data, the number of hot pixels can be used to estimate the burned area and predict environmental and economics consequences. In this work we study the dynamics of hot pixels detected in Brazil by satellite NOAA-12 during the period 1998-2007, using the method Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis, which serves to detect and quantify multifractal properties of non-stationary temporal series. We calculate the generalized Hurst exponent h(q), Renyi exponent (q) and singularity spectrum f( ). The results show the existence of power-law long-term correlations that are described by a hierarchy of scaling exponents, which is the consequence of an underlying multifractal stochastic process. Based on this empirical result we also show that the Multifractal Cascade Model can be used to produce synthetic data for hot pixels dynamics. The observed multifractal property of temporal series of hot pixels should be incorporated in theoretical models and computer simulations of the fire dynamics and related phenomena.