Skip to main content

FRAMES logo
Resource Catalog

Document

Type: Journal Article
Author(s): Xinxin Ye; Pablo E. Saide; Johnathan W. Hair; Marta A. Fenn; Taylor J. Shingler; Amber J. Soja; Emily Gargulinski; Elizabeth B. Wiggins
Publication Date: 2022

Wildfire emissions are a key contributor of carbonaceous aerosols and trace gases to the atmosphere. Induced by buoyant lifting, smoke plumes can be injected into the free troposphere and lower stratosphere, which by consequence significantly affects the magnitude and distance of their influences on air quality and radiation budget. However, the vertical allocation of emissions when smoke escapes the planetary boundary layer (PBL) and the mechanism modulating it remain unclear. We present an inverse modeling framework to estimate the wildfire emissions, with their temporal and vertical evolution being constrained by assimilating aerosol extinction profiles observed from the airborne Differential Absorption Lidar (DIAL) - High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL) during the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) field campaign. Three fire events in the western U.S., which exhibit free-tropospheric injections are examined. The constrained smoke emissions indicate considerably larger fractions of smoke injected above the planetary boundary layer (f>PBL, 80 % - 94 %) versus the column total, compared to those estimated by the WRF-Chem model using the default plume rise option (12% - 52 %). The updated emission profiles yield improvements for the simulated vertical structures of the downwind transported smoke, but limited refinement of regional smoke AOD distributions due to the spatiotemporal coverage of flight observations. These results highlight the significance of improving vertical allocation of fire emissions on advancing the modeling and forecasting of the environmental impacts of smoke.

Online Links
Citation: Ye, Xinxin; Saide, Pablo E.; Hair, Johnathan; Fenn, Marta; Shingler, Taylor; Soja, Amber; Gargulinski, Emily; Wiggins, Elizabeth. 2022. Assessing vertical allocation of wildfire smoke emissions using observational constraints from airborne lidar in the western U.S. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 127(21):e2022JD036808.

Cataloging Information

Regions:
Keywords:
  • airborne lidar
  • biomass burning
  • inverse modeling
  • LiDAR - Light Detection and Ranging
  • plume rise
  • WRF-Chem
Record Last Modified:
Record Maintained By: FRAMES Staff (https://www.frames.gov/contact)
FRAMES Record Number: 66784