Treesearch

Prescribed fire is a significant emissions source in the U.S. and that needs to be adequately characterized in atmospheric transport/chemistry models. In addition, the Clean Air Act, its amendments, and air quality regulations require that prescribed fire managers estimate the quantity of emissions that a prescribed fire will produce. Several published papers contain a few emission factors for prescribed fire and additional results are found in unpublished documents whose quality has to be assessed. In conjunction with three research projects developing detailed new emissions data and...

We present SP2 observations of BC mass, size distributions and mixing state in emissions from laboratory and field biomass fires in California, USA. Biomass burning is the primary global black carbon (BC) source, but understanding of the amount emitted and its physical properties at and following emission are limited. The single particle soot photometer (SP2) uses a laser-induced incandescence technique to measure the mass and mixing state of individual BC particles. Its BC mass response does not depend on the BC mixing state, unlike optical and/or filter-based methods. The SP2 took part...

We evaluated the contribution of catastrophic fires to the total burned area and the amount of tree mortality in Russia since the 1970’s. Such fires occurred in the central regions of European Russia (1972, 1976, 1989, 2002, 2010), Khabarovsk krai (1976, 1988, 1998), Amur region (1997-2002), Republics of Yakutia and Tuva (2002), Magadan and Kamchatka oblast (1984, 2001, 2010), and Irkutsk, Chita, Amur regions, Buryat, Agin national districts (2003, 2007-08). We define a catastrophic fire as a single high-severity fire that covers more than 10,000 ha and results in total consumption of the...

Emissions of trace gases and aerosols by biomass burning (BB) have a significant influence on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, air quality, and climate. BB emissions depend on a range of variables including burned area, fuels, meteorology, combustion completeness, and emission factors (EF). Emission algorithms provide BB emission inventories (EI) which serve as critical input for Chemical Transport Models (CTM) employed in atmospheric sciences in a wide array of studies. Many different BB EI are commonly used and agreement among these EI is often poor. In general, the sensitivity...

A daily, high-resolution, global fire emissions model has been built to estimate emissions from open burning for air quality modeling applications: The Fire INventory from NCAR (FINN version 1). The model framework uses daily fire detections from the MODIS instruments and updated emission factors, specifically for speciated non-methane organic compounds (NMOC). Global daily fire emissions have been produced for 2005-August 2010. The improvements to the emission factors has led to an increase in simulated NMOC emissions when compared to other global emission estimates, including the Global...

A comprehensive suite of instruments were used to characterize volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and other trace gases (e.g., CO, CH4, NO2, etc.) emitted from controlled burns of various fuel types common to the Southeastern and Southwestern United States. These laboratory-based measurements were conducted in February 2009 at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana. An on-line GC-MS provided highly speciated VOC measurements of alkenes, alkanes, oxygenates, aromatics, biogenics, and nitrogen-containing compounds during the flaming or smoldering...

Northern Eurasia, covering 20% of the global land mass and containing 70% of boreal forest, is extremely sensitive to climate changes. Warmer temperatures in this region have led to less snowfall, earlier spring, longer growing season, and reduced moisture for soil and vegetation in summer. Recently, severe drought and record high temperatures caused catastrophic fires in Russia during the summer of 2010. Future climate projections suggest significant changes in fire regimes which may increase fire frequency, burned area, fire severity, and fire emissions in northern high latitude ecosystem...

Wildfires are a significant fraction of global biomass burning and a major source of trace gas and particle emissions in the atmosphere. Understanding the air quality and climate implications of wildfires is difficult since the emissions undergo complex transformations due to aging processes during transport away from the source. As part of the third Fire Lab at Missoula Experiment (FLAME III), we investigated the oxidative aging of smoke from combustion of 12 different types of vegetation commonly burned in North American wildfires. In these photochemical chamber experiments, we quantified...

Climate changes are projected to profoundly influence vegetation patterns and community compositions, either directly through increased species mortality and shifts in species distributions, or indirectly through disturbance dynamics such as increased wildfire activity and extent, shifting fire regimes, and pathogenesis. High-elevation landscapes have been shown to be particularly sensitive to climatic change, and are likely to experience significant impacts under predicted future climate change conditions. Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), a high-elevation five-needle pine species that...

On November 17th 2009 we used a Twin Otter aircraft outfitted with an airborne Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (AFTIR), aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS), single particle soot photometer (SP2), nephelometer, Licor CO2 analyzer, and a chemiluminescence ozone instrument to measure the initial emissions from a 100 hectare prescribed fire in chaparral fuels on the central coast of California, U.S.A. We also measured the post emission chemical changes in the isolated downwind plume for a distance corresponding to about 4.5 hours of smoke aging. The light scattering to CO2 ratio increased...