Transport of smoke from Canadian forest fires to the surface near Washington, D.C.: Injection height, entrainment, and optical properties

Colarco, Peter R.; Schoeberl, M. R.; Doddridge, Bruce G.; Marufu, L. T.; Torres, Omar; Welton, Ellsworth J.

doi:10.1029/2003jd004248

Cited by 243 publications

(209 citation statements)

References 39 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

199

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Similar to the study presented here, Canadian wildfires have increased O 3 concentrations in Houston, TX (Morris et al, 2006), and as far away as Europe (Spichtinger et al, 2001). Evidence of Canadian wildfire smoke and biomass burning affecting the MA's particulate matter (PM) air quality was also previously reported (Adam et al, 2004;Colarco et al, 2004;Sapkota et al, 2005), but wildfire smoke has also been recognized in high-O 3 events on the East Coast (Fiore et al, 2014). DeBell et al (2004) presented a chemical characterization of the July 2002 Quebec wildfire smoke plume and its impact on atmospheric chemistry in the northeastern United States.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Observations and impacts of transported Canadian wildfire smoke on ozone and aerosol air quality in the Maryland region on June 9–12, 2015

Dreessen¹,

Sullivan

Delgado

2016

Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Canadian wildfire smoke impacted air quality across the northern Mid-Atlantic (MA) of the United States during June 9-12, 2015. A multiday exceedance of the new 2015 70-ppb National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for ozone (O 3 ) followed, resulting in Maryland being incompliant with the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) revised 2015 O 3 NAAQS. Surface in situ, balloon-borne, and remote sensing observations monitored the impact of the wildfire smoke at Maryland air quality monitoring sites. At peak smoke concentrations in Maryland, wildfire-attributable volatile organic compounds (VOCs) more than doubled, while non-NOx oxides of nitrogen (NOz) tripled, suggesting long range transport of NOx within the smoke plume. Peak daily average PM 2.5 was 32.5 µg m −3 with large fractions coming from black carbon (BC) and organic carbon (OC), with a synonymous increase in carbon monoxide (CO) concentrations. Measurements indicate that smoke tracers at the surface were spatially and temporally correlated with maximum 8-hr O 3 concentrations in the MA, all which peaked on June 11. Despite initial smoke arrival late on June 9, 2015, O 3 production was inhibited due to ultraviolet (UV) light attenuation, lower temperatures, and nonoptimal surface layer composition. Comparison of Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model surface O 3 forecasts to observations suggests 14 ppb additional O 3 due to smoke influences in northern Maryland. Despite polluted conditions, observations of a nocturnal low-level jet (NLLJ) and Chesapeake Bay Breeze (BB) were associated with decreases in O 3 in this case. While infrequent in the MA, wildfire smoke may be an increasing fractional contribution to high-O 3 days, particularly in light of increased wildfire frequency in a changing climate, lower regional emissions, and tighter air quality standards.Implications: The presented event demonstrates how a single wildfire event associated with an ozone exceedance of the NAAQS can prevent the Baltimore region from complying with lower ozone standards. This relatively new problem in Maryland is due to regional reductions in NOx emissions that led to record low numbers of ozone NAAQS violations in the last 3 years. This case demonstrates the need for adequate means to quantify and justify ozone impacts from wildfires, which can only be done through the use of observationally based models. The data presented may also improve future air quality forecast models.PAPER HISTORY

show abstract

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Observations and impacts of transported Canadian wildfire smoke on ozone and aerosol air quality in the Maryland region on June 9–12, 2015

Dreessen¹,

Sullivan

Delgado

2016

Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Other studies provided good agreement of model simulations with observations for an emission release between the surface and the planetary boundary layer (PBL) height as well as a fixed height of 1.2 km (Wang et al, 2006;Matichuk et al, 2007). While Jian and Fu (2014) found a large sensitivity of BC concentrations on the emission heights, Colarco (2004) demonstrated that the differences between a near-surface emission release and a release between 2 and 6 km are small for convective atmospheric conditions. Chen et al (2009) used the GEOS-CHEM model with Global Fire Emission Data Base 2 (GFED2) emissions to simulate the smoke transport from North American forest fires.…”

Section: A Veira Et Al: Impact On Transport Black Carbon Concentramentioning

confidence: 72%

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

et al. 2015

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

“…Aloft aerosol plumes from both forest-fires and dust storms events are often transported over long distance, affecting both climate radiation and air quality on regional/continental scales [1,2]. They often result in significant contribution to the column aerosol optical depths (AOD) which can bias the estimate of PM2.5 from the satellite column observation [3,4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrated Observation of Aerosol Plumes Transport and Impacts on the Air Quality Remote Sensing in the Northeast U.S.

Nazmi

Han

et al. 2016

EPJ Web of Conferences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, we present a cluster analysis of plume transport paths to New York City (NYC, 40.821ºN, 73.949ºW) for the 8-year period during 2006-2013. We also show cases of such aloft aerosol plumes intrusion and mixing into the boundary layer (PBL) and the impact on local air quality. Range-resolved monthly occurrence frequency and modification of local aerosol optical properties are presented. The NOAA-HYSPLIT cluster analysis indicates 6 main transport paths; and the optical properties (optical depth-AOD, Angstrom exponent-AE and single scatter albedo-SSA) of aerosol for each cluster are characterized. We further illustrate the impact of these aloft plumes on the satellite MODIS estimate of ground PM2.5 levels and observe that when the aloft plumes-layer AODs are filtered out using lidar, the correlation of MODIS AOD-PM2.5 can be much improved.

show abstract

Transport of smoke from Canadian forest fires to the surface near Washington, D.C.: Injection height, entrainment, and optical properties

Cited by 243 publications

References 39 publications

Observations and impacts of transported Canadian wildfire smoke on ozone and aerosol air quality in the Maryland region on June 9–12, 2015

Observations and impacts of transported Canadian wildfire smoke on ozone and aerosol air quality in the Maryland region on June 9–12, 2015

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

Integrated Observation of Aerosol Plumes Transport and Impacts on the Air Quality Remote Sensing in the Northeast U.S.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About