Abstract
Recently, a worse and large-scale forest fire broke out across Turkey, which adversely affected the country’s air quality level and caused a tremendous loss. Mugla and Antalya cities were the hot spot areas of this fire that experienced adverse effects. In this paper, we examined and compared the air pollution before and during the forest fire episode i.e., from 27 July to 10 August 2021 in Antalya and Mugla. The results show that before the fire accusation, i.e., on 27 July, the daily mean aerosol optical depth (AOD) was 0.1 indicating a clear sky. However, after the fire breakout on 28 July, this daily mean AOD value rapidly increased to 0.52 on 6 August, indicating intense air pollution. The highest AOD was 2.2 over northern Marmaris, Ula, southeastern Milas, and Mugla Merkezon on 5 August 2021. The results show that peak fire activity occurred during 4–8 August. Meanwhile, the highest NO2 concentration was 167 µmol/m2 over mid-east Merkez and Köycegiz. The peak HCHO load was 750 µmol/m2 over southern Mugla city. Moreover, Mugla and central Antalya cities experienced the highest O3 concentration of 0.14 mol/m2. Similarly, at the junction of Dalaman, Köycegiz, and Ortaca, a peak in CO (0.08 mol/m2) and aerosol index (AI) (3.5) had been observed. The high-altitude smoke was observed over Mugla city. Whereas, over Antalya, mixed aerosols were dominant, followed by smoke, dust, non-smoke fine mode, and fine dominating aerosols.
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Data used in this study can be downloaded from the Google Earth Engine website (https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datassets/).
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Acknowledgements
We are also thankful to NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL), MODIS, and Suomi NPP/VIIRS mission scientists for the production of the data used in this research effort. We are also grateful to European Space Agency (ESA) for providing Copernicus Sentinel data and products.
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ST conceptualizes the work and wrote the manuscript. AM make maps and wrote the description. UM conducted analysis. ZH wrote the manuscript.
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Tariq, S., ul‐Haq, Z., Mariam, A. et al. Assessment of air quality during worst wildfires in Mugla and Antalya regions of Turkey. Nat Hazards 115, 1235–1254 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-022-05592-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-022-05592-5