As Brazil completed the Bicentennial of Independence, this Wednesday (7), the Amazon was burning. It took just seven days in September for the fires in the biome to reach 18,374 hotspots and surpass the fire record for the entire month of September last year.
On Independence Day alone, there were 1,676 hotspots in the biome. The number was the lowest recorded so far in the month, but it is still significant.
In September 2021, Inpe recorded 16,742 fires in the Amazon. This value, however, was relatively low, considering the history for this month, which has an average number of outbreaks of 32,110. In 2020, for example, there were 32,017 fires.
The first four days of the month already showed that the September fires could be more intense than we have seen, even under the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government, in which deforestation and fires exploded – it is worth mentioning that the two phenomena go together, with the fire being used to “clean up” the downed area.
Data from the Queimadas program, from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), show that three days of the current month recorded, consecutively, more than 3,000 hotspots. A sequence of such high values, day after day, in September, has not happened, at least since 2007.
The Inpe records are accompanied by satellite images, which, on September 5th and 6th, show a long gray cloud covering southern Amazonas, Rondônia and Acre. Similar images were also seen in August of this year, the worst wildfire since 2010.
Satellite captures also show smoke from Amazon fires (and from outbreaks in Bolivia) covering millions of km² in the South American continent and reaching São Paulo and other states in the Southeast and South.
Despite the large areas affected, the situation is not unprecedented in the region. In years with many fires in the Amazon, the smoke usually spreads across the continent.
The situation recalls what happened in August 2019, when the darkening of the skies over São Paulo in the middle of the afternoon drew attention, at the same time that the number of hotspots exploded in the Amazon.
According to an article by researcher Alberto Setzer, however, the concentration of smoke in 2019 was not enough to “turn off the light” in the city of São Paulo. Such darkening may have been caused by very concentrated and thick low and medium clouds.
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