Biomass burning emissions estimated with a global fire assimilation system based on observed fire radiative power

Kaiser, J. W.; Heil, Angelika; Andreae, Meinrat O.; Benedetti, Angela; Чубарова, Н. Э.; Jones, Luke; Morcrette, J.-J.; Razinger, Miha; Schultz, Martin; Suttie, Martin; Werf, Guido R. van der

doi:10.5194/bg-9-527-2012

Cited by 1,208 publications

(1,500 citation statements)

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“…Some recent inventories have started to use satellite retrievals of fire radiative power instead of burnt area which appears superior at least in some world regions (Kaiser et al, 2012). However, a comparison of five global biomass burning emission inventories based on different satellite fire or burned area products showed a large range of 365-1422 Tg CO emissions for the year 2003 (Stroppiana et al, 2010;Reddington et al, 2016).…”

Section: Biomass Burning Emissionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report: Assessment of global-scale model performance for global and regional ozone distributions, variability, and trends

Young

Naik

Fiore

et al. 2018

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

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265

274

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The goal of the Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report (TOAR) is to provide the research community with an up-to-date scientific assessment of tropospheric ozone, from the surface to the tropopause. While a suite of observations provides significant information on the spatial and temporal distribution of tropospheric ozone, observational gaps make it necessary to use global atmospheric chemistry models to synthesize our understanding of the processes and variables that control tropospheric ozone abundance and its variability. Models facilitate the interpretation of the observations and allow us to make projections of future tropospheric ozone and trace gas distributions for different anthropogenic or natural perturbations. This paper assesses the skill of current-generation global atmospheric chemistry models in simulating the observed present-day tropospheric ozone distribution, variability, and trends. Drawing upon the results of recent international multi-model intercomparisons and using a range of model evaluation techniques, we demonstrate that global chemistry models are broadly skillful in capturing the spatio-temporal variations of tropospheric ozone over the seasonal cycle, for extreme pollution episodes, and changes over interannual to decadal periods. However, models are consistently biased high in the northern hemisphere and biased low in the southern hemisphere, throughout the depth of the troposphere, and are unable to replicate particular metrics that define the longer term trends in tropospheric ozone as derived from some background sites. When the models compare unfavorably against observations, we discuss the potential causes of model biases and propose directions for future developments, including improved evaluations that may be able to better diagnose the root cause of the model-observation disparity. Overall, model results should be approached critically, including determining whether the model performance is acceptable for the problem being addressed, whether biases can be tolerated or corrected, whether the model is appropriately constituted, and whether there is a way to satisfactorily quantify the uncertainty.

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Section: Biomass Burning Emissionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report: Assessment of global-scale model performance for global and regional ozone distributions, variability, and trends

Young

Naik

Fiore

et al. 2018

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

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265

274

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“…With consistent aerosol emission and fire intensity information, GFASv1.1 provides an appropriate input data set for our simulations. Kaiser et al (2012) found that GFAS emissions implemented in the global circulation model ECMWF are only able to reproduce AOT observations in a reasonable way, if global GFAS wildfire emissions are multiplied by a global factor of 3.4. This zero-order approximation also provided reasonable global modeling results in studies by Huijnen et al (2012) andvon Hardenberg et al (2012) well as ECHAM5-HAM1.…”

Section: Emission Data Setsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fire emission heights in the climate system – Part 2: Impact on transport, black carbon concentrations and radiation

et al. 2015

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Abstract. Wildfires represent a major source for aerosols impacting atmospheric radiation, atmospheric chemistry and cloud micro-physical properties. Previous case studies indicated that the height of the aerosol-radiation interaction may crucially affect atmospheric radiation, but the sensitivity to emission heights has been examined with only a few models and is still uncertain. In this study we use the general circulation model ECHAM6 extended by the aerosol module HAM2 to investigate the impact of wildfire emission heights on atmospheric long-range transport, black carbon (BC) concentrations and atmospheric radiation. We simulate the wildfire aerosol release using either various versions of a semiempirical plume height parametrization or prescribed standard emission heights in ECHAM6-HAM2. Extreme scenarios of near-surface or free-tropospheric-only injections provide lower and upper constraints on the emission height climate impact. We find relative changes in mean global atmospheric BC burden of up to 7.9 ± 4.4 % caused by average changes in emission heights of 1.5-3.5 km. Regionally, changes in BC burden exceed 30-40 % in the major biomass burning regions. The model evaluation of aerosol optical thickness (AOT) against Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) and Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) observations indicates that the implementation of a plume height parametrization slightly reduces the ECHAM6-HAM2 biases regionally, but on the global scale these improvements in model performance are small. For prescribed emission release at the surface, wildfire emissions entail a total sky top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiative forcing (RF) of −0.16 ± 0.06 W m −2 . The application of a plume height parametrization which agrees reasonably well with observations introduces a slightly stronger negative TOA RF of −0.20 ± 0.07 W m −2 . The standard ECHAM6-HAM2 model in which 25 % of the wildfire emissions are injected into the free troposphere (FT) and 75 % into the planetary boundary layer (PBL), leads to a TOA RF of −0.24 ± 0.06 W m −2 . Overall, we conclude that simple plume height parametrizations provide sufficient representations of emission heights for global climate modeling. Significant improvements in aerosol wildfire modeling likely depend on better emission inventories and aerosol process modeling rather than on improved emission height parametrizations.

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“…The emission factors are from Akagi et al (2011), the estimated fuel loading are assigned using model results from Hoelzemann et al (2004), and the fraction of biomass burned is assigned as a function of tree cover (Wiedinmyer et al, 2006). The Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS, Kaiser et al, 2012) calculates biomass burning emissions by assimilating Fire Radiative Power (FRP) observations from MODIS at a daily frequency and 0.5 • resolution and is available for the time period 2000-2013. After correcting the FRP observations for diurnal cycle, gaps etc., it is linked to dry matter combustion rate using Wooster et al (2005) and CH 4 emission factors from Andreae and Merlet (2001).…”

Section: Biomass Burningmentioning

confidence: 99%

The global methane budget 2000–2012

Saunois

Bousquet

Poulter

et al. 2016

Earth Syst. Sci. Data

948

733

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Abstract. The global methane (CH 4 ) budget is becoming an increasingly important component for managing realistic pathways to mitigate climate change. This relevance, due to a shorter atmospheric lifetime and a stronger warming potential than carbon dioxide, is challenged by the still unexplained changes of atmospheric CH 4 over the past decade. Emissions and concentrations of CH 4 are continuing to increase, making CH 4 the second most important human-induced greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide. Two major difficulties in reducing uncertainties come from the large variety of diffusive CH 4 sources that overlap geographically, and from the destruction of CH 4 by the very short-lived hydroxyl radical (OH). To address these difficulties, we have established a consortium of multi-disciplinary scientists under the umbrella of the Global Carbon Project to synthesize and stimulate research on the methane cycle, and producing regular (∼ biennial) updates of the global methane budget. This consortium includes atmospheric physicists and chemists, biogeochemists of surface and marine emissions, and socio-economists who study anthropogenic emissions. Following Kirschke et al. (2013), we propose here the first version of a living review paper that integrates results of top-down studies (exploiting atmospheric observations within an atmospheric inverse-modelling framework) and bottom-up models, inventories and data-driven approaches (including process-based models for estimating land surface emissions and atmospheric chemistry, and inventories for anthropogenic emissions, data-driven extrapolations). . Top-down inversions consistently infer lower emissions in China (∼ 58 Tg CH 4 yr −1 , range 51-72, −14 %) and higher emissions in Africa (86 Tg CH 4 yr −1 , range 73-108, +19 %) than bottom-up values used as prior estimates. Overall, uncertainties for anthropogenic emissions appear smaller than those from natural sources, and the uncertainties on source categories appear larger for top-down inversions than for bottom-up inventories and models.The most important source of uncertainty on the methane budget is attributable to emissions from wetland and other inland waters. We show that the wetland extent could contribute 30-40 % on the estimated range for wetland emissions. Other priorities for improving the methane budget include the following: (i) the development of process-based models for inland-water emissions, (ii) the intensification of methane observations at local scale (flux measurements) to constrain bottom-up land surface models, and at regional scale (surface networks and satellites) to constrain top-down inversions, (iii) improvements in the estimation of atmospheric loss by OH, and (iv) improvements of the transport models integrated in top-down inversions.

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Biomass burning emissions estimated with a global fire assimilation system based on observed fire radiative power

Cited by 1,208 publications

References 45 publications

Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report: Assessment of global-scale model performance for global and regional ozone distributions, variability, and trends

Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report: Assessment of global-scale model performance for global and regional ozone distributions, variability, and trends

Fire emission heights in the climate system – Part 2: Impact on transport, black carbon concentrations and radiation

The global methane budget 2000–2012

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