Amresh Gunasingham, Straits Times 22 Jul 09;
ALMOST twice as many hot spots have been detected in Sumatra as at the same time last year and the year before.
Satellite images yesterday showed 2,248 hot spots in Sumatra, compared with 1,229 from the same time last year and 1,218 in 2007. The number surpassed even the 2,031 hot spots in 2006, the last time that smoke haze hit Singapore hard.
The fires have been fuelled by an earlier and longer dry season caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon.Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Yaacob Ibrahim warned last month that uncontrolled burning in Indonesia in the dry weather would mean smoke haze returning to Singapore with a vengeance.
So far, Singapore has escaped the worst because of favourable wind directions. The 24-hour Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) reading that measures air quality was in the good range at 39 yesterday.
But if the winds change to south-westerly, and with signs of El Nino still growing, haze could hit Singapore and persist for months.
El Nino is a warming of surface temperatures over the Pacific Ocean which wreaks havoc on global weather patterns - as well as economies.
'In a typical year, the south-west monsoon season should end by September but with the El Nino outlook, we expect the dry season to extend to October,' said the director-general of the National Environment Agency's (NEA) meteorological services division, Mr Foong Chee Leong.
'The lack of showers over fire-prone areas will increase the prospects for transboundary haze till late October.'
NEA data shows 4,716 hot spots in the regions of Riau, West Sumatra, Jambi and South Sumatra to date this year.
This is 'significantly higher' than the number recorded over the same period in each of the last three years, probably because of the earlier dry season, said Ms Lim Lay Eng, senior meteorological officer at NEA.
The south-west monsoon season usually starts in late June but El Nino has brought it forward a month, she said.
The last bad haze year for Singapore was in 2006, when the drier weather conditions from a moderate El Nino saw an increase in forest clearing activity.
That year, the hot spot count in Sumatra hit 12,014, and Singapore experienced its worst haze in a decade, with the PSI peaking at 150 in October.
It is not certain yet how quickly or severely El Nino will develop this year.
But the haze problem will persist while open burning is carried out by plantation companies, said Dr Lee Poh Onn, research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
He said that political will was still the most important factor in monitoring such burning and taking action against it.
South-east Asia has been hit by haze almost every year since 1997. That year, a strong El Nino saw annual rainfall plunge 48 per cent below the long-term average, while the annual average temperature rose 1.4 deg C above the long-term average, the NEA said.
The tell-tale evidence
Straits Times 22 Jul 09;
THE image above shows a fire scene, taken by the French SPOT-4 satellite, on Saturday at 11.33am (Singapore time) in Riau province (see map).Near the centre of the image, two smoke plumes (blue-green) can be seen.
The greenish areas are vegetation, while the pinkish areas are exposed soil.
The darker, purple patch between the two smoke plumes is a recently burnt area.
The satellite image was received and processed at the Centre for Remote Imaging, Sensing and Processing (CRISP), the National University of Singapore.