Impact of a Strong Biomass Burning Event on the Radiative Forcing in the Arctic

Abstract

Abstract. The aim of the presented study was to investigate the impact on the radiation budget of biomass burning smoke plume transported from Alaska to high Arctic region (Ny-Alesund, Svalbard) in early July 2015. This high aerosol load event is considered exceptional in the last 25 years with mean aerosol optical depth increased by the factor of 10 in comparison to the average summer background values. We utilised in-situ data with hygroscopic growth equations as well as remote sensing measurements as inputs to radiative transfer models with an objective to estimate biases associated with (i) hygroscopicity,

Modification of Local Urban Aerosol Properties by Long-Range Transport of Biomass Burning Aerosol

“…The results of the NAAPS model simulations (Navy Aerosol Analysis and Prediction System [69]; http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/aerosol) over Poland on [24][25][26][27][28][29][30] August 2016 were used to interpret the results. For brevity, in The AOD values over Warsaw are listed in Table 2, where the passive satellite remote sensors (5:45 UTC pixel of SEVIRI at 635 nm and daily mean pixel of MODIS at 500 nm, both representative for the chosen location), the ground based passive remote sensor (the closest in time to 5:45 UTC columnar AOD derived by MFR-7 at 500 nm), the active remote sensor (the closest in time to 5:45 UTC columnar AOD derived from PollyXT lidar signals at 532 nm), as well as the AOD simulated by models (daily mean pixel of CAMS at 550 nm and NAAPS at 500 nm) are in a good and expected general agreement.…”

“…Depending on specific weather circulation, the fire-induced aerosol transport can be heat wave driven [3,5]. Both local and long-range transported wildfire aerosols can have a large impact on typically observed aerosol properties and therefore their occurrence over particular areas leads to large changes of radiative fluxes [22,27,28]. The effects of wildfire aerosols on the PM air quality are expected to be significant [29].…”

“…These can be attributed to air masses of either local or advection driven origin. For the latter case, one may consider long-range transported pollution such as arctic haze [36], mineral dust intrusions [16,35,37,38], volcanic aerosols [39][40][41] and biomass burning [7,25,27,42]. Aerosol properties within the multi-layered atmosphere can be observed by means of height-resolved ground-based or satellite lidar observations (e.g., EARLINET, PollyNET, CATS); although for the majority of world-wide spread ground-based lidars, the spectral measurements are not available due to their complexity, high development cost and necessity to employ skilled personnel for lidar operation and data retrieval.…”

Impact of biomass burning plume on radiation budget and atmospheric dynamics over the arctic

“…In the following section a brief description of the obtained vertical profiles of optical and radiative properties, as well as turbulence are given. More detailed description and discussion is to be found in [5].…”

“…Then, assuming a value of refractive index for a known particle size distribution, one can obtain g by means of Mie theory. The detailed description of the proposed approach is given in [5].…”