Record-breaking fires have flared up across the Amazonian state of Roraima, in northern Brazil, amid one of the worst droughts in 25 years. The number of hotspots in the state this past February alone hit an all-time high of 2,057, according to the Queimadas program run by INPE, Brazil’s space agency. Roraima is one of the smallest of the nine states that make up the Brazilian Amazon, but has already recorded more than half of the Amazon’s fires in the first two months of 2024. Fires at this time of the year aren’t unexpected in Roraima, Brazil’s northernmost state, whose location north of the equator gives it an inverted climate compared to other Amazonian states. The dry season here peaks in the first three months of the year. But with the current drought intensified and prolonged by El Niño, the abnormal warming of the surface waters of the equatorial Pacific Ocean, there’s been less rain than usual over the Amazon Rainforest. This climate pattern, still active and strong, contributed to historic droughts and calamitous fires in the Brazilian Amazon last year. In Roraima, El Niño abruptly stopped the 2023 rains, anticipating the onset of the dry season and intensifying its effects. Experts say this natural phenomenon favored the fire boom currently underway. “We are facing a series of megafires,” Haron Xaud, a researcher at Embrapa, Brazil’s agricultural research agency,and a professor of natural resources at the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR), told Mongabay by phone. “The situation is delicate because…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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