Hridayesh Joshi | 3 June 2019
While the government seems to have no effective disaster management plan in place to control such forest fires in the Himalayas (or elsewhere in the country) occurring every year, the total loss of forest wealth has gone beyond 2,000 hectares.
Ranikhet, Almora: As a raging fire continued to destroy precious wealth in the forests of Uttarakhand, scientists have warned that this may be among the worst infernos we have seen in nearly two decades.
While replying to a comment on the blaze, Mark Parrington, senior scientist working with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), wrote on Twitter, “Looking at the May monthly total fire radiative power, 2019 is second worst in 16 years after 2012.”
Parrington explained that radiative power is the quantity related to the intensity of the active fire which scientists use to estimate emissions of pollutants.