Air Pollution and Home Blood Pressure: The 2021 Athens Wildfires

Andreadis, Emmanuel A.; Vourkas, George I; Varelas, George; Angelopoulos, E; Gerasopoulos, E.; Mihalopoulos, Nikolaos; Thomopoulos, Costas

doi:10.1007/s40292-022-00547-0

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 16 publications

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“…The long-range transport of wildfire smoke can lead to a change in the chemical composition of the plume and also affect the local and regional air quality upon the planetary boundary layer entrainment (Colarco et al, 2004;Pani et al, 2018;Wu et al, 2021). Following a wildfire, the poor air quality due to the high gaseous and particulate pollutant levels imposes serious threats of asthma, respiratory diseases, cardiovascular effects, and lung cancer via human inhalation exposure (Manisalidis et al, 2020;Rice et al, 2021;Andreadis et al, 2022). Biomass burning also reduces the amount of solar radiation, as presented in the study by Rosário et al (2022) that showed that the mean drop in solar radiation was up to 200 W m −2 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigation of the effects of the Greek extreme wildfires of August 2021 on air quality and spectral solar irradiance

Masoom¹,

Fountoulakis²,

Kazadzis³

et al. 2023

Atmos. Chem. Phys.

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Abstract. In August 2021, a historic heatwave was recorded in Greece which resulted in extreme wildfire events that strongly affected the air quality over the city of Athens. Saharan dust was also transferred over Greece on certain days of the same period due to the prevailing southern winds. The impact of these events on air quality and surface solar radiation is investigated in this study. Event characterization based on active and passive remote sensing instrumentation has been performed. The study shows that significantly increased levels of air pollution were recorded from the end of July to the first week of August. The smoke led to unusually high aerosol optical depth (AOD) values (up to 3.6 at 500 nm), high Ångström exponent (AE) (up to 2.4 at 440–870 nm), and a strong and negative dependence of single-scattering albedo (SSA) on wavelength that was observed to decrease from 0.93 at 440 nm to 0.86 at 1020 nm, while the dust event led to high AOD (up to 0.7 at 500 nm), low AE (up to 0.9 at 440–870 nm), and a positive dependence of SSA on wavelength that was observed to increase from 0.89 at 440 nm to 0.95 at 1020. Furthermore, the smoke plume was also detected over the PANhellenic GEophysical observatory of Antikythera on 7 August, which is about 240 km away from Athens. Increased AOD values (up to ∼ 0.90 at 500 nm) associated with a high fine-mode AOD (up to ∼ 0.85 at 500 nm) and decrease in SSA with wavelength suggested the dominance of fine biomass burning aerosols. The impact of dust and smoke on solar irradiance revealed significant differences in the spectral dependence of the attenuation caused by the two different aerosol types. The attenuation of solar irradiance in the ultraviolet (UV-B) spectrum was found to be much lower in the case of dust compared to smoke for similar AOD500 values. Differences were less pronounced in the near-infrared and visible spectral regions. The large AODs during the wildfires resulted in a decrease in the noon UV index by up to 53 %, as well as in the daily effective doses for the production of vitamin D (up to 50 %), in the daily photosynthetically active radiation (up to 21 %) and in the daily global horizontal irradiance (up to 17 %), with serious implications for health, agriculture, and energy. This study highlights the wider impacts of wildfires that are part of the wider problem for Mediterranean countries, whose frequency is predicted to increase in view of the projected increasing occurrence of summer heatwaves.

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