Helen Brindley’s research while affiliated with Imperial College London and other places

We present an analysis of 20 years of fire and albedo data in Africa. We show that, in the mean, the sub‐Saharan Africa post‐fire surface albedo anomaly can be parameterized using an exponential recovery function, recovering from a decrease of 0.019±0.001 $0.019\pm 0.001$ immediately after a fire with a time constant of 34.0±0.4 $34.0\pm 0.4$ days. Although the magnitude of albedo changes shows large spatial and temporal variations and a strong land cover type (LCT) dependency, exponential recovery is observed in the majority of LCTs. We show that fires cause long‐term surface brightening, with an Africa‐wide albedo increase of (9.5±0.2)×10−4 $(9.5\pm 0.2)\times 1{0}^{-4}$ 10 months after a fire, but we find this is driven almost exclusively by slow vegetation recovery in the Kalahari region, confirming previous findings. Using downward surface shortwave flux (DSSF) estimates, we calculate the fire‐induced surface radiative forcing (RF), peaking at 5±2 $5\pm 2$ Wm⁻² in the burn areas, albeit with a significantly smaller effect when averaged temporally and spatially. We find that the long‐term RF in months 5–10 after a burn averaged over the continent is negative because of the brightening observed. Despite a well‐documented reduction in burning in Africa in the recent decades, our temporal analysis does not indicate a decrease in the overall fire‐induced RF likely due to large interannual variability in albedo anomaly and DSSF data. However, we observe a decline in the short‐term RF in southern hemisphere Africa, driven by both a reduction in fires and changes in LCT distributions.