During the 2015 dry season, there were massive forest fire events in Indonesia associated with the extremely dry condition due to the El-Niño event. Therefore, the synthetic study of fire events have collected global attention in recent years, especially after 1997/1998 El-Niño event brought considerable environmental and economic damages. This study aims to evaluate the impact of the latest strong El-Niño episode in 2015 in comparison to past events to understand the drought and fire conditions under which they occurred. For this purpose, a long-Term reanalysis dataset, MERRA2, provided by NASA was utilized to examine the relationship between aerosol optical depth (AOD) and meteorological parameters during 1980-2015. This study also used the Global Fire Emission Dataset version 4.1 (GFED4s) to examine the biomass burning carbon emissions during 1997-2015. The fire and smoke pollution in 2015 had occurred repeatedly in southern Sumatra and south-central Kalimantan and the most severe drought and forest fires during 2015 occurred in September and October. The results indicate that fire activity in Sumatra and Kalimantan can be realistically predicted by ENSO indices. The difference in fire environments between Sumatra and Kalimantan may be partly attributed to different patterns of human activity and government policy. This study analyzed the drought as the preconditioning of the fire occurrence. Further studies will be needed to clarify the contribution of local human activity as a trigger of fires. © 2018 Asian Association on Remote Sensing. All Rights Reserved.
