Using NOAA/AVHRR Products

to Monitor El Nio Impacts:

Focus on Indonesia in 199798
G. Gutman,*, # I. Csiszar,*, + and P. Romanov*, +

ABSTRACT
The development of the El NioSouthern Oscillation (ENSO) in 199798, the most intense in this century, has
been monitored by space- and ground-based observations. In this study, the authors present the signatures of ENSO
impacts on the surfaceatmosphere system, as detected in satellite products that are routinely derived at NOAA from
measurements by a single instrument on board NOAA polar-orbiting satellitesthe Advanced Very High Resolution
Radiometer (AVHRR). The Indonesian archipelago was selected to demonstrate how AVHRR products can be synergistically used to monitor interannual variability, such as caused by ENSO, on regional and global scales. The authors
examined month-to-month changes in surfaceatmosphere conditions over the region during July 1997June 1998.
The major ENSO impact over the Indonesian archipelago was a prolonged dry period with anomalously low amounts
of cloud, precipitation, and water vapor. The net effect of these changes was a significant increase in the absorbed shortwave and outgoing longwave radiation fluxes. ENSO-induced drought coincided with the slash-and-burn agricultural
season, which resulted in persistent fires and smoke from biomass burning, covering larger areas, producing more smoke,
remaining longer than during most dry seasons, and causing health hazards for millions of people in Southeast Asia.
Analysis of the impact of fires on cloud microphysics confirms earlier suggestions that the effective cloud droplet size
decreases due to smoke aerosols and cloud reflectivity increases due to higher concentration of small droplets. Analysis
of areas with active fires showed a decrease in both surface albedo and fractional green vegetation as a result of intensive burning.

1. Introduction
The El NioSouthern Oscillation (ENSO) effect
on precipitation and temperature has been thoroughly
analyzed in many studies (e.g., Ropelewski and
Halpert 1987; Kousky and Leetmaa 1989; Kiladis and
Diaz 1989; Halpert and Ropelewski 1992; Bell and
Halpert 1998). In tropical areas, drier and warmer conditions are strongly pronounced in the north and northeast of South America, Southeast Asia, northern

*Office of Research and Applications, NOAA/NESDIS,

Camp Springs, Maryland.
+
Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Fort
Collins, Colorado.
#
Current affiliation: NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Corresponding author address: Dr. Ivan Csiszar, NOAA/
NESDIS, Office of Research and Applications, E/RA1, WWB
712, 5200 Auth Road, Camp Springs, MD 20746.
E-mail: icsiszar@nesdis.noaa.gov
In final form 22 November 1999.
2000 American Meteorological Society

Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

Australia, northern and central India, and southwest

Africa. An ENSO-induced increase in precipitation is
usually observed in southern South America, equatorial western Africa, southern India, and southern China.
The recent ENSO 199798 event was special not
only because it is considered the most intense in this
century but also because for the first time this major
climate phenomenon could be monitored from the
earliest stages of development through its decline
(AMS 1999). Southeast Asia was one of the first regions over the globe to be affected by ENSO 1997
98. In Indonesia, ENSO-related drought caused a
cereal shortfall of millions of tons and a significant
reduction in coffee and sugar production. Along with
the agricultural drought in Indonesia and surrounding
countries, the recent ENSO had a catalyzing effect on
the fires that regularly occur in tropical forests. Fires,
deliberately set by local population in slash-and-burn
agricultural practices during AugustSeptember, are
usually put out by monsoon rains arriving in September
October. The fires of 1997, however, produced more
smoke, and remained longer than during most dry sea1189

sons because of the shift in atmospheric circulation

and the consequent change in rainfall patterns.
Indonesia was affected more strongly than any other
country in the region. The effects of smoke transported
by winds from Indonesia were devastating to much
of Southeast Asia because the resulting air pollution
led to health hazards for millions of people in the region (Wooster et al. 1998). Several accidents, including at least one air crash and one shipwreck, were
directly caused by the reduced visibility. Natural disasters are often the trigger that push fragile civil structures into a crisis. The ENSO impact was one of many
contributing factors in causing the economic and political unrest that has been in the country during the
last several years.
Several satellite-based studies have analyzed the
observed impact of the previous ENSO episodes on
tropical land areas (e.g., Liu et al. 1994; Anyamba et al.
1996; Myneni et al. 1996; Kogan 1998), but Southeast Asia had not been studied from satellites as extensively as South America or Africa. Yet, this part of
the globe represents an active response zone to ENSO
episodes (e.g., Halpert and Ropelewski 1992).
Moreover, in examining ENSO impact in the Tropics,
satellite-based studies have investigated only a few relationships, mostly concerned with the observed patterns in sea surface temperature, outgoing longwave
radiation (or precipitation), and vegetation indices
(e.g., Myneni et al. 1996).
Using operationally collected spectral measurements by the Advanced Very High Resolution
Radiometer (AVHRR) on board NOAA polarorbiting satellites, NOAA has developed and routinely generates a set of products for the monitoring
of surface and atmospheric conditions over the globe
(Reynolds and Smith 1994; Gutman et al. 1995;
Kogan 1997; Stowe et al. 1997; Janowiak and Xie
1999). We combined all these products to detect the
signatures in the surfaceatmosphere system produced
by ENSO over the Indonesian archipelago during
199798. The large number of parameters provide a
comprehensive look at surface and atmospheric conditions. Signatures due to the well-known changes in
sea surface temperature, cloud amount, and precipitation are clearly seen in the data. Satellite measurements, on the other hand, revealed changes in land
surface conditions often undetected by conventional
observations. Satellite data proved to be particularly
useful in observing processes related to the unique
characteristic of the ENSO 199798 event in Indonesia:
the widespread fire activity and the corresponding high
1190

aerosol loading in the atmosphere. However, as it will

also be shown, fire-related smoke may cause significant distortions in the satellite signal, which requires
a careful interpretation of data in these extreme
conditions.
The current study demonstrates for the first time
how a suite of multispectral satellite products, composing a dozen meteorological variables, routinely
derived from a single instrumentNOAA/AVHRR
can be assembled for the monitoring of the spatial
temporal dynamics of ENSO impacts. The synergy of
many variables allows us to better understand the big
picture characterizing the state of the surface
atmosphere system and the relationship between different components of that system.
2. Data
All current global AVHRR datasets generated at
NOAA are based on Global Area Coverage (GAC)
4-km data, which are produced by sampling and averaging onboard the satellite the full 1-km resolution
AVHRR measurements in five wavebands: the visible
(0.580.68 m, channel 1), near-infrared (0.73
1.1 m, channel 2), midinfrared (3.63.9 m,
channel 3) and thermal infrared (10.311.3 and 11.5
12.5 m, channels 4 and 5, respectively). Both the
Local Area Coverage (LAC) data and the High Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) data are at a resolution of 1-km. The onboard recording of LAC data
for limited areas and time intervals is scheduled by
NESDIS ground controllers. The HRPT data are read
out at local ground receiving stations.
Our analysis is based on data products from two
satellite-only datasets routinely produced at NOAA/
NESDIS: the third generation monthly Global Vegetation Index (GVI) dataset (Gutman et al. 1995) and the
AVHRR Pathfinder Atmosphere (PATMOS) monthly
dataset (Stowe and Jacobowitz 1997); and two
datasets, based on blended AVHRR and ground observations, routinely produced at the NOAA National
Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP): the
monthly sea surface temperature (SST) dataset
(Reynolds and Smith 1994) and the Climate Anomaly
Monitoring System Outgoing Longwave Radiationbased Precipitation Index (CAMS-OPI) dataset
(Janowiak and Xie 1998). For the analysis of fire and
smoke effects, we also used level-1B AVHRR data
obtained from the NOAA Satellite Active Archive
(SAA) (http://www.saa.noaa.gov).
Vol. 81, No. 6, June 2000

TABLE 1. Summary of the AVHRR-derived variables/acronyms used in this paper.

Acronym

Parameter

Data source

Dataset

Original
resolution

sea surface temperature

AVHRR/GAC+buoy

NCEP/SST

precipitation

AVHRR/GAC+gauge

CAMS-OPI

2.5

VIS

visible reflectance

AVHRR/GAC

GVI

0.15

NIR

near-infrared reflectance

"

"

"

normalized difference
vegetation index

"

"

"

T4

channel-4 brightness temp

"

"

"

T5

channel-5 brightness temp

"

"

"

TPW

total precipitable water

"

"

"

LST

land surface temperature

"

"

"

ASR

all-sky absorbed solar flux

AVHRR/GAC

PATMOS

110 km

ASR0

cloud-free absorbed solar

radiation

"

"

"

OLR

all-sky outgoing longwave

radiation

"

"

"

OLR0

cloud-free outgoing longwave

radiation flux

"

"

"

FCC

fractional cloud cover

"

"

"

AOT

aerosol optical thickness

"

"

"

RGB

redgreenblue imagery

AVHRR/GAC, LAC

SAA/1B

4 km, 1 km

ALB

surface albedo

AVHRR/LAC

"

1 km

CREFL

cloud reflectivity

"

"

1 km

CREFF

effective droplet radius

"

"

1 km

FIMMA

fire identification, mapping, and

monitoring from AVHRR

"

"

1 km

SST
PREC

NDVI

The datasets with the corresponding acronyms for

variables used in this study are summarized in Table 1
and their brief descriptions are given in the appendix.
Our analysis also relied on the information provided
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

in the Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletins and the

NOAA Climate Diagnostics Bulletins produced at
NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC).

1191

3. Time series analysis

In deriving anomalies, we used a 7-yr base period
prior to the ENSO 1997 event (April 1985June 1991,
June 1992December 1993). These periods correspond to the years when the calibration of AVHRR
visible and near-IR data was reliable, and there were
no major atmospheric perturbations, such as effects of
the Mount Pinatubo eruption in July 1991. The year
1994 was not included because of the artifacts caused
by the orbital drift of NOAA-11 by that time. Data from
the NOAA-14 satellite (1995 and later) were not considered because of the unreliable visible and near-IR
calibration. To study the 199798 ENSO period, however, NOAA-14/AVHRR data were adjusted for
calibration.
The period for analysis is July 1997June 1998,
that is, from the time of the noticeable change in SST
and precipitation (PREC) around Indonesia to the time
of the onset of La Nia, which immediately followed
the ENSO 199798 event. In the forthcoming analysis the anomalies will be shown along with 1 (standard deviation), which will be used as an indicator of
the magnitude of the anomalies. Anomalies beyond the
1 and 2 values are significant at the 68% and 95%
confidence levels, respectively, if the monthly data are
uncorrelated and have a Gaussian distribution. In a
strict statistical sense these conditions are not always
met, and thus the actual confidence levels may differ
from the theoretical values. Because of the relatively
short base period, anomalies may also be biased. As
it will be seen, however, in most cases their magnitude is large enough to be considered with confidence
as a clear ENSO-related signal.

For time series analysis, we concentrated on the

area limited to 10S10N and 95E125E, comprising the nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, and
Singapore. We subdivided the area into four sectors
of about 1000 km 1000 km: Sumatra, JavaTimor,
Borneo, and Celebes. Figure 1 shows these sectors on
the International GeosphereBiosphere Programme
(IGBP) 1-km land cover map of the region produced
at the United States Geological Survey EROS Data
Center (Loveland and Belward 1997).
a. SST and PREC (NCEP blended datasets)
Figure 2 shows anomalies in sea surface temperature (SST) and PREC. Unlike the eastern Pacific with
strong positive SST anomalies as the primary indicator of El Nio, waters around Indonesia exhibited
strong negative anomalies in 1997. Some of these
negative SST anomalies may have been partially
caused by contaminated AVHRR retrievals due to
smoke aerosols (see below). Unfortunately, there were
no in situ moored buoy or ship SST measurements to
verify the satellite observations and/or to establish the
suspected bias (V. Kousky 1999, personal communication). The only available in situ data were from
14 drifting buoys with only five observations during
SeptemberOctober in the whole area but none in the
Java Sea. However, the spread of the negative SST
anomalies to the west of Indonesia, that is, to the areas not affected by smoke, as well as the absence of
such anomalies in the Java Sea, suggests that the decrease in SST is not a pure artifact. This is consistent
with the results by Kiladis and Diaz (1989), who related these anomalies to ENSO-induced anomalous
trade winds, which modulate the depth of the ther-

FIG. 1. The IGBP AVHRR-derived 1-km spatial resolution land cover classification over the Indonesian archipelago produced by
USGS EROS Data Center, with the four sectors of the current analysis.
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Vol. 81, No. 6, June 2000

FIG. 2. Regional maps of monthly anomalies of NCEP blended products: SST and PREC. The upper color bar refers to SST standard deviation units (C). The lower color bar refers to precipitation standard deviation units (cm).

mocline and associated upwelling. This explains why

the anomalies are well pronounced in the deep ocean
west of Sumatra and are much weaker in the relatively
shallow waters of the Java Sea.
Note that in the Tropics a small decrease may bring
SST below the value critical for atmospheric convection and affect precipitation during ENSO events
(Quiroz 1983). Over the JavaTimor sector the climatological mean is ~2727.5C in the JulySeptember
period. The ~1C negative anomalies thus indicate that
SST values remained 1.52C below the 28C isotherm, which is considered an approximate threshold
for allowing efficient convection in the Tropics (Bell
and Halpert 1998). From December 1997, SST exceeded its ~28.529C norm.
A good correlation between anomalies of SST and
PREC during 1997 is indicative of the contribution of
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

changes in SST to changes in convective activity. The

negative PREC anomalies persisted through most of
1997, with rain amounts rising during November
December. The arrival of seasonable rain in November increased PREC values so that they reached their
normals in December, except for northern Borneo and
Celebes. In January 1998, the whole region experienced a sharp drop in rain amount as compared to the
norm that was even stronger than in September
October. The lack of rain in the beginning of 1998 caused
resumed drought conditions. Over Borneo and Celebes,
precipitation did not reach its normal values until April.
b. Atmospheric variables (PATMOS)
Figure 3 shows anomalies of monthly areal means
in the fractional cloud cover (FCC), the top-ofatmosphere (TOA) fluxes of the absorbed shortwave
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and outgoing longwave radiation in all-sky conditions

(ASR and OLR) and of the cloud-free absorbed shortwave radiation (ASRo), the total precipitable water
(TPW), and the atmospheric optical thickness over
ocean (AOT) (see appendix).
Time series of TPW indicate that the cooler sea
surface was accompanied by the subsidence of dry air
in 1997. The warming trend of SST in 1998 is followed
by the increase of TWP anomalies, except for the
Celebes region, where SST anomalies also remained
negative until May.
Anomalies of OLR, as expected, negatively correlate with FCC. OLR anomalies are also good indicators
of PREC anomalies, as PREC is based predominantly
on OLR in the Tropics. The strong negative FCC

anomalies and the associated positive anomalies in

OLR indicate a decrease of convective activity in
1997. Starting in March 1998, FCC gradually increased (following the trends of SST and TPW), and
exhibited positive anomalies in MayJune. OLR
showed a corresponding decrease from January to
June, going below its norms in MayJune. Changes
in cloud amount correlate well with TPW during the
whole period.
One can also expect a negative correlation between
ASR and FCC. This is obvious for most of the investigated period, except for SeptemberNovember 1997.
Shortwave radiances during this period were strongly
affected by smoke from forest fires, also shown by the
increase in AOT over waters surrounding Indonesia.

FIG. 3. Time series of monthly anomalies of PATMOS-derived variables averaged over the four sectors: Borneo ( ), Celebes ( ),
JavaTimor (~), Sumatra (). The straight lines are 1 standard deviations.
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Vol. 81, No. 6, June 2000

This fire event produced an anomaly comparable by

its magnitude only to that after the Mount Pinatubo
eruption in June 1991, both being the strongest over
the last 15 yr.
The reflection from increased amount of atmospheric aerosol caused strong negative anomalies in
the cloud-free flux ASRo. This effect, however, is opposite to that of decreasing cloudiness. Thus, the allsky flux ASR, having a compound effect of surface,
clouds, and aerosols, exhibited suppressed, near-zero
anomalies during the intense fire period. That is, the
ASR increase that would be expected from a decreasing trend in FCC during SeptemberNovember 1997
did not occur, implying that the cloud forcing was
nearly compensated by the aerosol forcing.
c. Surface variables (GVI)
Strictly speaking, the variables derived from the
GVI data are not for the ground surface, but for the top
of the atmosphere in cloud-free conditions, thus including atmospheric effects also. The only exception
is land surface temperature (LST), in which the atmospheric effect is supposed to be accounted for (see
appendix). The cloud-free TOA variables, however,
are indicative of land surface conditions when variability in the atmospheric effects (mostly aerosol and water
vapor) is not too strong. In the case of strong atmospheric perturbation, the TOA radiances, shortwave in
particular, contain more information on the atmosphere than on the surface unless they undergo appropriate screening and/or adjustments.
Figure 4 shows anomalies in LST, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and visible reflectance (VIS). As mentioned earlier, the lack of
precipitation caused delays in second-season crop development and led to serious drought, which in many
places produced positive LST anomalies, behaving
almost opposite to those of SST. Since air temperature anomalies over this region match closely those of
SST (Kiladis and Diaz 1989), LST may thus yield information independent from and complementary to
that obtained from conventional air temperature and
SST observations.
Positive anomalies in LST and negative anomalies
in PREC indicate dry conditions in OctoberNovember
1997. For the JavaTimor sector, LST anomalies are
particularly strong (up to 4C in SeptemberOctober),
which is explained by the land cover consisting mainly
of urban areas, bare soil, and cultivated agriculture, as
compared to the other sectors, having rain forest (see
Fig. 1). The lack of rain, starting again in January this
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

time mostly over Borneo, produced an increase in

LST, which was followed by a spread of uncontrolled
fires during FebruaryApril 1998 in the eastern part
of the island. The negative LST anomalies, on the other
hand, coincide well with the positive PREC anomalies in Java during the same period.
Drought is also indicated by negative NDVI
anomalies in the region. However, spectral reflectances are important in interpreting NDVI anomalies
(Fig. 5). The drought signal is characterized usually
by a decrease in the near-IR reflectance (NIR), with
weak negative anomalies observed for most of the area
starting in October 1997. Note that part of the negative
anomalyis caused by the change from green biomass
to burnt biomass. The fire scar signature can be clearly
seen on high-resolution images (see Fig. 6).
The weak negative NIR anomalies in Fig. 5 are too
small to explain the strong NDVI anomalies (down by
0.25) in SeptemberOctober. As can be seen, the main
cause of NDVI decrease was a tremendous increase in
the VIS, owing mostly to the atmospheric contamination by smoke. (The prevailing circulation did not allow too much smoke to spread south of Borneo, hence
no increase in the visible reflectance over Java
Timor.) Thus, the negative NDVI anomalies, for the
most part, are not driven by decreasing NIR as expected during droughts, but by a huge increase in VIS,
consistent with that in AOT over ocean. This result
suggests that in case of strong atmospheric perturbation, such as smoke from forest fires or volcanic eruption, NDVI may not be a clear indicator of drought
conditions. The automated cloud screening procedure,
based on thermal thresholds alone applied to the original data (Gutman et al. 1995), could not remove the
residual effect of smoke that was extremely persistent
over vast areas. This implies that AVHRR data processing for surface products requires cloud screening
that should include visible thresholds. On the other
hand, this result also suggests a way to discriminate
between cloud and smoke in long-term AVHRR data
time series.
Even if the NDVI climatology has residual cloud
contamination during the seasons with persistent
clouds (Gutman et al. 1995), consideration of anomalies in smoke-free areas effectively eliminates this bias.
Prior to the onset of ENSO, the NDVI values were
close to normal (not shown). During July 1997April
1998 NDVI values show strong anomalies for the
whole region, except for December and January, when
drought was relieved by the moisture supplies from
rains arriving in November. But as shown above, only
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FIG. 4. Regional maps of monthly anomalies of GVI-derived variables. The color bars refer to corresponding standard deviation units.

for Java and Celebes can we state with a relative confidence that the reduced NDVI indicates drought,
whereas for Borneo and Sumatra, where NDVI is
strongly contaminated by smoke from fires, the
drought signal is merely a small portion of the one
observed. Thus, in such extreme atmospheric conditions, LST anomalies, which were less affected by
smoke (the only noticeable effect is in September in
the western Borneosouthern Sumatra region), seem
to be a better indicator of surface conditions than NDVI.
4. Studying fire impacts
a. Mapping active fires
Clearing forests by fires is a regular agricultural
practice in Indonesia. Fires are also started by planta1196

tion companies, as this is the cheapest and quickest

way to clear forest and scrub land for commercial development. The coincidence of ENSO 1997 and the
regular fire season was the trigger that produced a natural disaster of unprecedented dimensions.
Figure 7 presents a regional view (about 1000 km
1000 km) of the spatialtemporal patterns of clouds,
fires, and smoke over Borneo during July 1997April
1998 as redgreenblue (RGB) composites of instantaneous GAC 4-km multispectral images (VIS in red,
NIR in green, and IR in bluehigh intensity for cold),
based on data obtained from NOAA/SAA. The images
were geocorrected and mapped into a Plate Carree
(latitudelongitude) projection. Locations of fires are
shown as a red overlay. Similar RGB images over Indonesia can be found in Wooster et al. (1998) and Fang
and Huang (1998).
Vol. 81, No. 6, June 2000

The fires were detected by

the Fire Identification, Mapping,
and Monitoring from AVHRR
(FIMMA) system, which was
developed at NOAA/NESDIS
based on the Justice et al. (1996)
algorithm. Modifications to the
algorithm, similar to those proposed by Giglio et al. (1999)
were made to eliminate residual
false signals caused by sun glint,
cloud edges, and strong thermal
gradients over nonuniform landscape. Although FIMMA has
been developed for use with the
full resolution 1-km data, we
applied it to all available LAC
and GAC data for that period
over Indonesia. The current
problem with LAC is that it is
often unavailable for areas of
interest. For example, LAC over
Indonesia is unavailable at
NOAA/SAA for the period of
the major fire activity in AugustOctober 1997. The results
FIG. 5. Time series of monthly means and anomalies of GVI-derived visible and near-IR
of application of fire detection reflectances over the four sectors: Borneo (+), Celebes (*), JavaTimor (~), Sumatra ().
algorithms to GAC data shown The straight lines are 1 standard deviations.
here are inferior to those obtained with full resolution 1-km
data (Belward 1994; Eva and Lambin 1998) but for a catastrophic event that affected all of Indonesia and
qualitative illustration of the dynamics of fires and adjacent countries. The rapid evolution of smoke in
smoke this application is sufficient. (An illustration of the area can be traced in this figure, blanketing almost
fire detection with LAC data and the burned areas as- half of the Indonesian archipelago in September
sociated with these fires is shown in Fig. 6.) Note, October. Smoke was spreading mostly to the west and
however, that the accumulated GAC time series rep- northwest, which we verified by examining the preresent a unique source of information for analysis of vailing winds produced by the regional model of the
seasonality and interannual variability of fires on the Singapore Meteorological Center. Owing to this cirglobal scale during the last two decades (Eva and culation pattern, the JavaTimor sector was not subLambin 1998).
ject to the effects of smoke to the same extent as
The images in Fig. 7 for July and the first half of Borneo and Sumatra. The rain systems arrived later
August are dominated by green and white colors over than usual but in late November the rains put out the
land. Vegetation, where VIS is low, NIR is high, and fires so that the end of 1997 was relatively fire and
IR is high, is shown in green, whereas white color in- smoke free. As a result of fires during 1997, the total
dicates clouds, where VIS and NIR are high, and IR burned area over Borneo and Sumatra estimated from
is low. The yellow color is associated with smoke satellites amounted to 45 600 km2 (Levine 1999).
Due to the extremely dry conditions, dried-out peat
from fires that can be distinguished from white clouds
because it is bright but not cold (some low warm and coal seams close to the surface also caught fire and
clouds are also rendered in yellow, however). First such fires were difficult to put out. [The peat releases
smoke appeared in July in southern and western poisonous sulfur and nitrogen pollutants along with
Borneo. Those were the first signs of the consequent the smoke that transported by winds produced health
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

1197

vice estimates of the total burned

areas over Borneo during FebruaryMarch exceed 7500 km2 and
these are conservative estimates
(Levine 1999). The wildfires left
hundreds of people homeless and
endangered rare animals in regional
national parks.
b. Atmospheric impact: Cloud
effective particle size and
cloud reflectivity
Figure 8 shows a comparison of
histograms of cloud effective droplet radius (CREFF) and visible reflectivity (CREFL) over Borneo
during and after the intense fire activity in late 1997. The retrievals
are based on LAC observations
with the method described in
Rosenfeld and Gutman (1994). We
processed three LAC images with
many fires (October) and three
with few fires (November). The
comparison of the histograms
shows that in October, during the
heavy aerosol loading, there is a
larger weight of small droplets in
the histograms. The higher values
of CREFL in October suggest a
higher concentration of small particles. These results are consistent
FIG. 6. AVHRR 1-km redgreenblue images over Borneo, with active fires shown with those of Rosenfeld and Lensky
as overlain red dots. Vegetation is rendered in green, smoke in yellow, clouds in white, (1998), who investigated sensitivand ocean in dark blue. The four images represent four stages of the 199798 event: the ity of cloud microstructure to
final phase of fires and smoke in 1997, the relatively fire-free period in the beginning of smoke aerosols over Indonesia in
1998, the second round of fires in 1998 and the postfire phase. The dark areas within red 1997. However, one should note
boxes in the southern and eastern part of the island in the 1 Feb and 25 Apr images, rethat there may have been differspectively, indicate burned areas.
ences also in cloud types during the
two periods, contributing to the difhazards over the region (Wooster et al. 1998; Levine ferences in CREFF and CREFL. Investigation of the
1999).] Thus, despite the rains in November complex relationship between large-scale changes in
December, dry conditions persisted, resulting in more atmospheric circulation, convective activity, precipifires in FebruaryMarch. This time, however, the fires tation, occurrence of fires, smoke emission, and cloud
in Borneo concentrated in eastern and northern formation is beyond the scope of this paper. What is
Borneo, unlike the previous locations, which were pre- obvious, however, is that large fires induce dramatic
dominantly in the south and western center. By the end changes in cloud formation processes. As indicated by
of April, the media announced that whatever could Rosenfeld and Lensky, the maritime clouds change to
burn in the active fire areas has burned and, with the a continental type with reduced rain potential, providarrival of rains, the second round of fires was finally ing a positive feedback to the existing drought
over. The U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Ser- conditions.
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Vol. 81, No. 6, June 2000

FIG. 7. Spatialtemporal patterns of clouds, fires, and smoke over Borneo during July 1997April 1998 presented as AVHRR/
GAC redgreenblue images with fires mapped as a red overlay. Smoke and warm clouds are rendered in yellow. Cold clouds are
white. Cloud- and smoke-free ocean and land are dark blue and green, respectively.

c. Surface impact: Albedo and fractional greenness of active fires in eastern Borneo. Only pixels classiFires and burnt areas on selected days are shown fied as clear by the CLAVR algorithm were used from
in Fig. 6. The four LAC images represent four stages two relatively cloud- and smoke-free images: 15 Januof the 199798 event: the final phase of
fires and smoke in 1997, the relatively
fire-free period in the beginning of 1998,
the second round of fires in 1998, and the
postfire phase. On the 1 February and
25 April images, burned areas are clearly
seen in the southern and eastern parts of
Borneo, respectively.
Figure 9 shows a comparison of histograms of broadband surface albedo,
ALB (Csiszar and Gutman 1999), and
green vegetation fraction, fg (Gutman
and Ignatov 1997), derived from LAC
FIG. 8. Histograms of cloud effective droplet radius and reflectivity over Borneo
data over a 2 2 area covering the area during and after the first period offire activity.
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

1199

ary and 25 April, that is, before and after the second
round of fires. A decrease of the peak of ALB caused
by a change from healthy to burned biomass is clearly
seen here as well as on the RGB images on the cover.
The shift in ALB toward lower values after the fires
is associated with a decrease in the near-IR, whereas
the decrease of the histograms width manifests the
process of changes from a diverse vegetation cover to
a more homogeneous burned area. The absolute values of ALB, however, may be a little higher than expected over that area due to the fixed low AOT in the
global atmospheric correction (see Csiszar and
Gutman 1999). Also, the effect of variability in atmospheric conditions for the two days should be further
verified.
The decrease in fg is significant and will lead to a
substantial decrease in the transpiration part of the latent
heat flux at the surface. The decrease in both albedo and
greenness contributes to a positive feedback for drought
persistence (drier and warmer surface) due to an increase in absorbed radiation and reduced evaporation.

biases here indicate persistent and strong ENSO-related signals.

As mentioned earlier, this event produced the typical ENSO-related perturbations in the circulation pattern over the equatorial western Pacific, driven by
anomalous trade winds and increased convective activity over the central and eastern Pacific, substantially
weakening the Walker circulation (Bell and Halpert
1998). As a result, there was less cloudiness, less precipitation, more vegetation stress, and higher temperatures over land during daytime. A clear indicator of
drought is the increase of mean LST by 1.7C and
1.1C, respectively. In general, these changes were
stronger and more persistent in the first period, when
monthly mean cloudiness and precipitation decreased
by 8% and 11 cm, respectively, resulting in a strong
increase in OLR (+21 W m2). The peculiarity of the
ENSO 1997 event over Indonesia is related to the timing of the persistent lack of rain and slash-and-burn
agriculture practiced by the local population during
AugustSeptember. The smoke from biomass burning
in 1997, especially over Borneo and Sumatra, which
is usually mitigated by monsoon precipitation, caused
5. Summary
a natural disaster of unprecedented dimension. The
smoke-induced increase of the atmospheric aerosol
Figure 10 summarizes the oceanatmospheric optical thickness was the strongest during the last 15 yr
land system interactions during the ENSO of 1997 in the region, comparable only by its magnitude to that
98. It shows monthly anomalies averaged over the caused by the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991. The
whole region for two relatively long periods: JulyDe- effect of smoke dominated the negative NDVI signal
cember 1997 and January 1998June 1998. The dis- because of the strong increase in the visible reflectance,
tinction was made based on the change of the sign of whereas the mean near-IR reflectance remained within
the SST anomaly (0.5C to +0.4C), accompanied by the noise level. The large fires produced a strong imsimilar changes in TPW (0.4 cm to +0.3 cm). Of pact on both the atmosphere and the land surface.
course, the spatialtemporal averaging may cancel out, Mean ASR0 decreased by 5 W m2, suppressing the inor smooth out signals of small-scale variability or crease of ASR due to decreasing cloud amount to
short-term changes that were discussed earlier. Large only 7 W m2.
The atmospheric impact of fires is
due to injection of smoke aerosols into
the atmosphere, which, in turn, affect
cloud microstructure and precipitation
formation processes. The impact of fire
smoke was found to contribute to the
transformation of the maritime clouds
into continental clouds with less rain potential, whereas at the surface, fires reduced green vegetation fraction and
albedo. The burned areas reflect less solar radiation, especially in the nearFIG. 9. Histograms of broadband land surface albedo and fractional vegeta- infrared. The decrease in the surface
tion greenness in the eastern part of Borneo before and after the second period of albedo and vegetation greenness leads to
fire activity.
changes in the radiation budget and the
1200

Vol. 81, No. 6, June 2000

apportionment of latent and sensible heat fluxes, that

is, changes in the surface microclimate. This chain of
events produced a positive feedback amplifying the
dry conditions in the landatmosphere system that was
broken only by the influx of air masses from outside
the region.
Note that anomalies of the cloud-free longwave
flux, OLR0, were negligibly small. Increased surface
temperature increases OLR0, and increased atmospheric water vapor concentration causes its decrease.
For most of the investigated period, surface temperature (LST or SST) and TPW changed in the same direction, canceling out the OLR0 signal. Potentially,
over the land surface areas in the JavaTimor sector
during SeptemberNovember 1997, increased LST
and decreased TPW could produce a relatively strong
signal. However, because of the spatial averaging
within the 110-km PATMOS grid boxes, containing
sufficient portions of land and ocean that produce opposite temperature signals, changes of OLR0 remain
unnoticed. Therefore, for surface energy budget studies over nonuniform waterland areas it is particularly
important to map AVHRR data at the highest possible resolution.
6. Concluding remarks
In this study, for the first time, a dozen meteorological variables from several datasets derived from a
single satellite instrumentAVHRRwere assembled for a multivariable regional analysis of the
impact of ENSO 199798. We focused on the Indonesian region because of the strongest signals observed
over that area in all products. In principle, such analysis could be done for any area of the globe. We tracked
month-to-month changes in surfaceatmosphere conditions over the region and demonstrated how the current routinely generated products combined with an
accumulated long-term time series could be synergistically utilized to detect strong anomalies and to monitor the onset, extent, intensity, and duration of the
ENSO-related changes.
The results indicate that in the case of intensive atmospheric perturbation, for example, due to smoke or
volcano aerosols, the AVHRR visible observations
and the vegetation indices derived from them contain
mostly the atmospheric signal. Being too distorted by
atmospheric effects, these observations should either
be corrected or not used for large-scale monitoring of
surface conditions. On the other hand, observations
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

FIG. 10. Schematic view of the interactions between surface/

atmospheric variables. The numbers represent anomalies integrated over the whole region over the second half of 1997 (upper
value) and the first half of 1998 (lower value). The sign indicates
its increase (+) or decrease ().

over the land surface before and after the smoke occurrence can be used to monitor the surface changes
on a finer scale caused by drought and fires, for example, decrease in biomass and albedo.
Thus, in the case of strong atmospheric influences,
caution should be exercised in interpreting vegetation
cover condition from the observed NDVI (and consequently, fg). In some areas/seasons or during special
events, such as the one discussed in this paper, statistical filtering would not eliminate contaminated pixels merely because they represent the majority of the
statistical population. Cloud screening based on thermal data alone, as in the GVI production, is inefficient
for smoke screening because of low thermal contrasts
with the multiyear thermal background. To avoid misinterpretation of NDVI anomalies, it is desirable to
include visible data in preprocessing procedures.
Curiously, however, the resulting inferencethe
drought conditionsturns out right but for the wrong
reason. Thus, in the monitoring context, NDVI actually may play the role of a smoke index instead of
its traditional role. Indeed, time series of NDVI are
more resistant to cloud contamination with a more
distinct smoke signal than those for VIS and NIR analyzed separately. That is, the noise induced by cloud
contamination is comparable for both channels but is
suppressed in NDVI because of their mutual compensation, whereas the smoke signal is much stronger in
the VIS than in the NIR. LST, on the other hand, was
1201

found to be an important characteristic for monitoring, having greater merit in that situation than the vegetation index because of stronger resistance to aerosol
effects in the IR, although for some applications, such
as SST derivation, this effect may be significant.
This study confirmed that high aerosol concentration has a strong signal in land visible reflectance over
dark, homogeneous surfaces. For tropical forested areas like Borneo, AOT can be calculated based on the
dense dark vegetation method, which would involve
3.7m data (e.g., Kaufman et al. 1997). Further, the
AOT over forest fire areas can be converted to smoke
amount, as done, for example, in the NOAA GOES
product (Prins et al. 1998).
Note that in this study we used only daytime data
from PATMOS. Future analysis should include minimum surface temperature data, perhaps from AVHRR
on morning satellites, and the diurnal temperature
range, both contributing to information on surface
conditions, hence the importance of processing not
only afternoon AVHRR data. Datasets from geostationary satellites, such as the one produced under the
auspices of the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project, should also be considered for this purpose.
In general, the ultimate goal for tackling the ENSO
puzzle is a synergistic use of AVHRR data records
along with those from other sensors onboard NOAA
polar orbiting and geostationary spacecraft and on
other operational space platforms with long-term data
records, such as DMSP SSM/I. Improvements in our
understanding of the big picture should come from
analyzing the spacetime patterns and lag correlations
in a multivariable system with information from a truly
multispectral domain covering the wavebands from
the visible to infrared to microwave. Some of the variables in our study are redundant; that is, they do not
introduce any new information to the system (PREC
and OLR in the Tropics is one example). Principal
component analysis should reveal the number of the
independent pieces of information (orthogonal vectors) in such a system.
The spatial resolution used for the current analysis of time series may be inadequate for studying some
processes of high spatial variability, such as the occurrence of fire scars. Moreover, in the case of products derived over both land and ocean, low-resolution
grid boxes contain mixed oceanland data for smaller
islands and along the coastline, where signals from the
land and ocean fractions may cancel out. Production
of global high-resolution data records, both historical
and in real time, is thus mandatory.
1202

Finally, note that land use has intensified in the

recent decade, whereas the occurrence of ENSO events
has also become more frequent and intensified. Future
research, therefore, should include investigation of the
compound effect of the interaction between climate
variability and anthropogenic impact.
Acknowledgments. We thank Gerry Bell and Ants Leetma
(both at CPC), Drs. George Ohring, Dan Tarpley (both at
NESDIS), and Dr. R. Kahn (NASA JPL) for reviewing the manuscript and Vern Kousky (CPC) for consultation. We also thank
the two anonymous reviewers for the thorough reviewing and constructive comments. Special thanks go to Larry Stowe (NESDIS)
for facilitating the use of PATMOS products, reviewing, and encouragement. John Janowiak and Mike Halpert (both at CPC)
helped in using the CAMP-OPI and conventional temperature
datasets, and Xiaofing Li (NESDIS) for providing information on
drifting buoys. The authors are grateful to Jeremy Throwe at SAA
for his readiness to assist at any moment. Thanks go to Andrew
Heidinger (NESDIS), and to Richard Reynolds and Diane Stokes
(both at NCEP) for assisting in the use of PATMOS and blended
SST products, respectively.

Appendix
a. The SST blended dataset
The monthly SST products generated at NCEP are
the result of blended analysis of AVHRR-derived SST
estimates produced at NESDIS by split-window algorithm (McClain et al. 1985) and ship and buoy data.
The monthly optimum interpolation (OI) fields are
derived by a linear interpolation of the weekly OI fields
to data fields then averaging the daily values over a
month. The satellite data are adjusted for biases and
then the OI SST analysis is produced weekly on a
1 grid (Reynolds and Smith1994).
b. The CAMS-OPI blended dataset
Monthly precipitation amounts (PREC) are produced from analysis of the AVHRR-derived outgoing
longwave radiation (OLR) product (Gruber and
Krueger 1984) and gauge observations for each (1)2
grid of the globe. The satellite monthly precipitation
estimates based on NOAA AVHRR OLR-based
Precipitation Index (OPI) are produced for each
2.5 grid box at NCEP. The rain gauge data from the
Climate Anomaly Monitoring System (CAMS) are
analyzed and gridded into a 2.5 grid, and then blended
with the satellite-based estimates. The satellite algorithm computes anomalous precipitation (from anomalies of OLR) and adds the anomaly to climatology to
form the monthly estimated precipitation. The blendVol. 81, No. 6, June 2000

ing technique interpolates the gauged-based analysis

with a constraint that the shape of the precipitation
field, defined by the Laplacian operator, follows that
of the OPI estimates (Janowiak and Xie 1999).
c. The PATMOS dataset
The AVHRR Pathfinder Atmosphere (PATMOS)
Project (Stowe and Jacobowitz 1997; http://
aries.nesdis.noaa.gov) is a NOAA/NESDIS activity in
support of the NOAA/NASA Pathfinder Program. It
consists of processing AVHRR GAC data from the ascending and descending parts of the orbits of afternoon
NOAA satellites to produce daytime and nighttime
time series of several atmospheric variables. In this
study we used only daytime data. Operational algorithms are applied to radiance data corrected for calibration drift to produce a consistent record of
atmospheric variables for climate change studies. The
output products are provided on an equal area grid with
resolution of 110 km, sampled twice daily, and averaged over five-day (pentad) and monthly periods. The
Clouds from the AVHRR (CLAVR) algorithm is the
basis for discriminating cloudy and clear AVHRR pixels (Stowe et al. 1999), CLAVR-1 being the first version of the algorithm that is used on a routine basis.
Although PATMOS was originally aimed at retroactive processing of 198194 data, during 199798 the
processing was conducted in nearreal time, which
enabled us to monitor the current events. The first
14 months of NOAA-14 data (January 1995February
1996) have also been processed recently. The current
study uses the following PATMOS monthly mean
(110 km)2 products: aerosol optical thickness (AOT)
over oceans (Stowe et al. 1997), fractional cloud cover
(FCC) (Stowe et al. 1999), all-sky (i.e., cloud-free and
cloudy combined) and clear-sky (cloud-free only)
shortwave radiation fluxes absorbed by the surface and
the atmosphere (ASR, ASR0), and outgoing longwave
radiation fluxes (OLR, OLR0) for each grid cell, without distinction of land and ocean (Jacobowitz 1991).
A programming error in the calculations of visible and
near-IR radiances for the NOAA-14 period affected
PATMOS products. Specifically, the AOT product,
which is directly related to the observed visible radiance, is affected proportionally to the calibration error. To account for this error, we adjusted the AOT for
the NOAA-14 period by a simple time-dependent additive correction, which we developed based on a radiative model generated lookup table and the ratio of
prelaunch and postlaunch calibration coefficients for
the visible channel (L. Stowe 1999, personal commuBulletin of the American Meteorological Society

nication). No adjustments for ASR, ASR0, and FCC

were made since the calibration error cannot be directly corrected in these products; hence some biases
may still be expected. However, the signals analyzed
in this study are much greater than the uncertainties
and errors in calibration.
An additional variable was calculated from
channel-4 (11 m) and -5 (12 m) brightness temperatures, T4 and T5, corrected for nonlinearity in calibration. The amount of clear-sky total water vapor or total
precipitable water (TPW) is based on the T4 T5 difference and is derived as kTPW (in cm). The signal
in TPW is a combination of atmospheric water vapor
and surface emissivity effects, the former dominating
in humid atmospheres and dense vegetation, and the
latter in dry atmospheres and sparse vegetation. To account for these effects at least in the first order, we
used a linear dependence of k on NDVI with kmin = 0.8
for bare soil, based on Eck and Holbens (1994) results for sub-Saharan Africa, and k max = 1.6 for
rainforest areas. The latter was determined from a regression between multiannual averages TPW and
NASA GvaP [Global Water Vapor blended product,
Randel et al. (1996)] over Borneo with rmse = 0.46 cm.
A comparison of TPW maps with those published in
NOAA/CPC Climate Diagnostics Bulletin, derived
from SSM/I measurements (Alishouse et al. 1990),
showed an agreement within ~0.5 cm in Southeast
Asia.
d. The GVI dataset
The operational NOAA Global Vegetation Index
(GVI) weekly dataset (Kidwell 1997; http://
www2.ncdc.noaa.gov/docs/gviug) is produced from
afternoon GAC observations, sampled in space (one
pixel out of about 16 GAC pixels) and in time (one observation per week), and mapped into (0.15)2 resolution
maps. The time sampling/compression is done by constructing a so-called weekly composite, representing
a mosaic map of observations during a 7-day period,
which are least contaminated by clouds. The weekly
composite visible (channel 1) and near-IR (channel 2)
reflectances, VIS and NIR, are calculated by applying
calibration coefficients and correcting for sun elevation and sunearth distance. The reflectances are then
combined into NDVI = (NIR VIS)/(NIR + VIS).
Channel 4 (11 m) and 5 (12 m) brightness temperatures, T4 and T5, are derived from observed radiances
and corrected for nonlinearity in calibration. They are
combined into a land surface temperature (LST = T4
+ 2.6 (T4 T5) + 1.3) (Becker and Li 1990). No emis1203

sivity correction that is usually based on NDVI was

applied because of strong contamination in the NDVI
signal by smoke.
The weekly data are further screened for residual
cloud and aggregated into monthly mean maps (April
1985present), which, in turn, are spatially interpolated and smoothed to remove data gaps and reduce
the residual noise to produce the third generation
GVI dataset of land-only averaged variables with the
original GVI (0.15)2 resolution (Gutman et al. 1995).
These monthly maps have been used to detect statistically significant departures from multiannual means
(Gutman and Ignatov 1995). Corrections for postlaunch calibration errors in VIS, NIR, and NDVI were
made prior to individual year means (Gutman 1999).
Note that the GVI-derived monthly mean VIS is
based on weekly composites as compared to the
PATMOS-derived monthly mean AOT, based on daily
cloud-free data. The composites tend to select the
clearest conditions so that if there was at least one
smoke- and cloud-free day, that day would be used for
a GVI composite. The PATMOS monthly AOT averaged over daily products are obviously more representative of the aerosol content than the GVI-derived VIS
based on cloud-free composites.
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