Vertical distribution of nighttime smoke following a wildland biomass fire in boreal Alaska

Ferguson, Sue A.; Collins, R. L.; Ruthford, Julia E.; Fukuda, Masami

doi:10.1029/2002jd003324

Cited by 22 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…In their inverse modeling analysis of the 2004 CO fire emissions using MOPITT data, Pfister et al [2005] distributed the emissions uniformly up to 400 hPa (∼ 7 km), although they find that injecting CO only into the boundary layer does not affect the inversion results. No such high‐altitude injection is expected for smoldering fires [ Ferguson et al , 2003], including peat fires.…”

Section: Simulation Of Atmospheric Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Inventory of boreal fire emissions for North America in 2004: Importance of peat burning and pyroconvective injection

Turquety¹,

Logan²,

Jacob³

et al. 2007

J. Geophys. Res.

221

273

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[1] The summer of 2004 was one of the largest fire seasons on record for Alaska and western Canada. We construct a daily bottom-up fire emission inventory for that season, including consideration of peat burning and high-altitude (buoyant) injection, and evaluate it in a global chemical transport model (the GEOS-Chem CTM) simulation of CO through comparison with MOPITT satellite and ICARTT aircraft observations. The inventory is constructed by combining daily area burned reports and MODIS fire hot spots with estimates of fuel consumption and emission factors based on ecosystem type. We estimate the contribution from peat burning using drainage and peat distribution maps for Alaska and Canada; 17% of the reported 5.1 Â 10 6 ha burned were located in peatlands in 2004. Our total estimate of North American fire emissions during the summer of 2004 is 30 Tg CO, including 11 Tg from peat. Including peat burning in the GEOS-Chem simulation improves agreement with MOPITT observations. The long-range transport of fire plumes observed by MOPITT suggests that the largest fires injected a significant fraction of their emissions in the upper troposphere.

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Section: Simulation Of Atmospheric Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Inventory of boreal fire emissions for North America in 2004: Importance of peat burning and pyroconvective injection

Turquety¹,

Logan²,

Jacob³

et al. 2007

J. Geophys. Res.

221

273

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“…They found that the injection height for most smoke plumes were within the boundary layer, especially in the tropics. Studies indicated that the injection heights of smoke plumes are sensitive to the type of biomass burned, the thermal power of the fire, and the atmospheric stability structure at the burning site (Ferguson et al, 2003;Mims et al, 2010;Val Martin et al, 2010Tosca et al, 2011;Zender et al, 2012).…”

Section: Y Jian and T-m Fu: Injection Heights Of Springtime Biomasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Injection heights of springtime biomass-burning plumes over peninsular Southeast Asia and their impacts on long-range pollutant transport

Yuan

2014

Atmos. Chem. Phys.

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Abstract. We analyzed observations from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) to determine the injection heights of biomass-burning smoke plumes over peninsular Southeast Asia (PSEA, here defined as Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar) in the spring, with the goal of evaluating the impacts on long-range pollutant transport. We retrieved the heights of 22 000 MISR smoke pixels from 607 smoke plumes over PSEA during February to April of the years 2001-2010. Forty-five percent of the analyzed smoke pixels were above the local mean boundary layer (1 km) at MISR overpass time (10:30 a.m. local time). We used the GEOS-Chem model to simulate the transport of PSEA biomass-burning pollutants in March 2001. On a monthly mean basis, we found that the direct injection of 40 % of the PSEA biomass-burning emissions had little impact on the long-range transport of CO to downwind regions, compared to a control simulation where all biomass-burning emissions were released in the boundary layer. This was because CO at the surface over PSEA was efficiently lifted into the free troposphere by deep convection associated with synoptic-scale weather systems. For pollutants with lifetimes shorter than the synoptic timescale, such as black carbon aerosol (BC), their long-range transport was much more sensitive to the initial plume injection height. The direct injection of NO x from PSEA biomass burning into the free troposphere drove increased formation and transport of peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN), which in turn led to a small increase in ozone over downwind southern China and the northwestern Pacific. The Pacific subtropical high transported BC emitted from PSEA biomass burning to the marine boundary layer over the tropical northwestern Pacific. We compared our model results to aircraft measurements over the northwestern Pacific during the TRACE-P campaign (March 2001). The direct injection of 40 % of the PSEA biomass-burning pollutants into the free troposphere in the model led to a more pronounced BC peak at 3 km over the northwestern Pacific. Our analysis highlights the point that the injection heights of smoke plumes presents great uncertainty over the interpretation of BC measurements downwind of biomass-burning regions.

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“…These extreme concentrations are the consequence of a very stable boundary layer. Ferguson et al (2003) observed almost no smoke at about 2000 m. The day after, fires were less active, and the concentrations were much lower, of the order of a ppmv. The extreme concentrations of the previous day were dissipated by the natural convection and advection.…”

Section: Hypothesis On the Mechanisms Explaining The Relation Betweenmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The fact that the smoldering phase can last long, with CO plumes staying close to the surface, entails high CO concentrations in the first layers, in particular at night. For example, Ferguson et al (2003) measured in Alaska extreme CO concentrations at midnight, reaching 27 ppmv, between 0 and 150 m altitude. These extreme concentrations are the consequence of a very stable boundary layer.…”

Section: Hypothesis On the Mechanisms Explaining The Relation Betweenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Signature of tropical fires in the diurnal cycle of tropospheric CO as seen from Metop-A/IASI

Thonat¹,

Crévoisier²,

Scott³

et al. 2015

Atmos. Chem. Phys.

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Abstract. Five years (July 2007 to June 2012) of CO tropospheric columns derived from the hyperspectral Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) on-board Metop-A are used to study the impact of fires on the concentrations of CO in the troposphere. Following Chédin et al. (2005Chédin et al. ( , 2008, who found a quantitative relation between the daily tropospheric excess of CO 2 and fire emissions, we show that tropospheric CO also displays a diurnal signal with a seasonality that agrees well with the seasonal evolution of fires given by Global Fire Emission Database version 3 (GFED3.1) and Global Fire Assimilation System version 1 (GFAS1.0) emissions and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Collection 5 burned area product. Unlike day-or night-time CO fields, which mix local emissions with nearby emissions transported to the region of study, the day-night difference of CO allows to highlight the CO signal due to local fire emissions. A linear relationship between CO fire emissions from the GFED3.1 and GFAS1.0 inventories and the diurnal difference of IASI CO was found over various regions in the tropics, with a better agreement with GFAS1.0 (correlation coefficient of R 2 ∼ 0.7) than GFED3.1 (R 2 ∼ 0.6). Based on the specificity of the two main phases of the combustion (flaming vs. smoldering) and on the vertical sensitivity of the sounder to CO, the following mechanism is proposed to explain such a CO diurnal signal: at night, after the passing of IASI at 21:30 local time (LT), a large amount of CO emissions from the smoldering phase is trapped in the boundary layer before being uplifted the next morning by natural and pyroconvection up to the free troposphere, where it is seen by IASI at 09:30 LT. The results presented here highlight the need to take into account the specificity of both the flaming and smoldering phases of fire emissions in order to fully take advantage of CO observations.

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Vertical distribution of nighttime smoke following a wildland biomass fire in boreal Alaska

Cited by 22 publications

References 38 publications

Inventory of boreal fire emissions for North America in 2004: Importance of peat burning and pyroconvective injection

Inventory of boreal fire emissions for North America in 2004: Importance of peat burning and pyroconvective injection

Injection heights of springtime biomass-burning plumes over peninsular Southeast Asia and their impacts on long-range pollutant transport

Signature of tropical fires in the diurnal cycle of tropospheric CO as seen from Metop-A/IASI

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