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'Megafire' events, in which large high-intensity fires propagate over extended periods, can cause both immense damage to the local environment and catastrophic air quality impacts on cities and towns downwind. Increases in extreme events associated with climate change (e.g.,…
Person:
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Climate, Emissions and Smoke, Fire Occurrence, Weather
Region(s): Alaska, California, Eastern, Great Basin, Hawaii, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Southern, Southwest, National
Keywords: air quality, fire potential, megafires

Lidar-data processing techniques are analyzed, which allow determining smoke-plume heights and their dynamics and can be helpful for the improvement of smoke dispersion and air quality models. The data processing algorithms considered in the paper are based on the analysis of…
Person:
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Mapping, Prescribed Fire
Region(s): Alaska, California, Eastern, Great Basin, Hawaii, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Southern, Southwest, National
Keywords: LiDAR - Light Detection and Ranging, remote sensing, smoke plume height, ground-based scanning LIDAR

As the climate in California warms and wildfires become larger and more severe, satellite-based observational tools are frequently used for studying impact of those fires on air quality. However little objective work has been done to quantify the skill these satellite…
Person:
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Fire Effects, Intelligence, Mapping, Models
Region(s): California
Keywords: autoregressive, PM2.5, satellite imagery, exceptional event, air pollution standards, NOAA Hazard Mapping System, wildfires, air quality, particulates, pollution, remote sensing, Sierra Nevada, fire management, smoke management

Forests sequester carbon from the atmosphere, helping mitigate climate change. In fire-prone forests, burn events result in direct and indirect emissions of carbon. High fire-induced tree mortality can cause a transition from a carbon sink to source, but thinning and prescribed…
Person:
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Fire Effects, Hazard and Risk, Prescribed Fire
Region(s): California
Keywords: carbon balance, thinning

[from the text] Land managers and officials need to understand the diverse public opinions toward smoke from wildland fires; however, a very limited amount of research has been conducted on this topic. Hence, land and fire managers are largely uncertain about society's…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Safety, Social Science
Region(s): Alaska, California, Eastern, Great Basin, Hawaii, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Southern, Southwest, National
Keywords: escaped fire, public perception, trust, public health, public attitudes

At the request of the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) Equipment and Technology Committee, the National Technology and Development Center undertook a project to determine the exposure levels of wildland smoke to firefighters. In 2010, at the request of the NWCG Risk…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Safety
Region(s): Alaska, California, Eastern, Great Basin, Hawaii, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Southern, Southwest, National
Keywords: carcinogen, respirable dust, inhalation irritants, particulate exposure, vegetative smoke

In this study, we quantified the production of fine particulate matter during smoldering combustion of organic peat soils common to boreal forested and non-forested ecosystems of the Great Lakes region, Northeast USA, Alaska, and Canada. Additionally, we investigated spectral…
Person:
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Fire Effects, Fuels, Hazard and Risk, Prescribed Fire
Region(s): Eastern
Keywords: fuel moisture, Michigan, peat fires, black carbon, boreal, peat

Emissions from biomass combustion are a major source of indoor and outdoor air pollution, and are estimated to cause millions of premature deaths worldwide annually. Whilst adverse respiratory health effects of biomass exposure are well established, less is known about its…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Safety
Region(s): International
Keywords: air pollution, biomass, health effects, heart rate, respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, blood pressure

In many areas of the United States, prescribed burning near highways is considered too risky because of the potential for smoke to obscure the highway. In one area in Florida, prescribed fire is used to reduce the risks of smoke related impacts to Interstate 95. The St Johns…
Person:
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Fire Prevention, Prescribed Fire
Region(s): Southern
Keywords: visibility, Florida, highways

Diagnostic carbon cycle models produce estimates of net ecosystem production (NEP, the balance of net primary production and heterotrophic respiration) by integrating information from (i) satellite-based observations of land surface vegetation characteristics; (ii) distributed…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Fire Effects, Models
Region(s): Alaska, California, Eastern, Great Basin, Hawaii, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Southern, Southwest, International, National
Keywords: Canada, carbon flux, atmospheric inversion, NEP - Net Ecosystem Productivity, rivers, Mexico, biomass burning, NEE - net ecosystem exchange

Developed as a quantitative measurement of fire intensity, fire radiative power (FRP) and the potential applications to smoke plume injection heights, are currently limited by the pixel resolution of a satellite sensor. As a result, this study, the first in a two-part series,…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Fire Behavior
Region(s): California
Keywords: fire temperature, fire area, fire detection, MODIS - Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, satellite, biomass burning, FRP - Fire Radiative Power

Fire radiative power (FRP) over a pixel area has been highlighted as a valuable parameter for quantitatively deriving smoke emissions. However, smoke plume rise forecasts and characterizations of fire intensity require additional information, including the FRP over the fire area…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Fire Effects, Weather
Region(s): California
Keywords: atmosphere, fire area, MODIS - Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, temperature, radiative transfer regime, biomass burning, FRP - Fire Radiative Power, water vapor, emissivity

Managers and policy-makers across broad disciplines and organizations are calling for a better understanding of public opinion on natural resource issues. One such issue is that of fire and its role in the management of our forests and rangelands. Public perceptions of fuel…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Fuels, Prescribed Fire, Social Science
Region(s): California, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Southern
Keywords: fuel reduction, public opinion, fire use, survey, public perceptions

Several state air quality agencies have developed policies to issue air quality health index (AQI) warnings based on low values of visual range. Visual range has been defined in the context of how far away a black object has to be such that it is just noticeable or visible. This…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke
Region(s): Alaska, California, Eastern, Great Basin, Hawaii, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Southern, Southwest, National
Keywords: air quality, visual range, PM2.5 emissions, particulate matter (PM) concentrations, AQI - Air Quality Index

Filter-based samplers have long been employed by monitoring networks to measure aerosol mass concentrations because they are robust and the collected filters can be used for analysis of speciated mass concentrations. However, filter-based samplers have several disadvantages.…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Monitoring and Inventory
Region(s): Alaska, California, Eastern, Great Basin, Hawaii, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Southern, Southwest, National
Keywords: NAAQS - National Ambient Air Quality Standards, PM2.5 emissions, PM10 emissions, continuous measurements

Before about 1970, visibility was meant only to denote the human capability to detect, recognize, and identify objects by means of the human visual mechanism. During the 1970s, as energy development in the form of strip mines and coal-fired power plants with associated emissions…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Safety
Region(s): Alaska, California, Eastern, Great Basin, Hawaii, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Southern, Southwest, National
Keywords: air quality, haze, public health, urban air pollution, urban visibility

In the US, wildfires and prescribed burning present significant challenges to air regulatory agencies attempting to achieve and maintain compliance with air quality regulations. Fire emission factors (EF) are essential input for the emission models used to develop wildland fire…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Models
Region(s): Northern Rockies
Keywords: air quality, combustion efficiency

Eulerian chemical transport models are extensively used to steer environmental policy, forecast air quality and study atmospheric processes. However, the ability of these models to simulate concentrated atmospheric plumes, including fire-related smoke, may be limited. Wildland…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Models
Region(s): Southern
Keywords: PM2.5, Georgia, smoke transport, plume modelling, CMAQ - Community Multiscale Air Quality Modeling System

Smoke plumes associated with wildland fires are difficult to characterize due to the non-linear behavior of the variables involved. Plume chemistry is largely modeled using emission factors to represent the relative trace gas and aerosol species emitted. Plume dynamics are…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Models
Region(s): California, Southern
Keywords: air quality, North Carolina, low intensity burns, smoke dispersion, smoldering fires

Land managers of the northern Rocky Mountains and south-central U.S. are challenged with numerous social and ecological changes, many of which are linked to climate change. The work presented here focuses on two important research gaps: 1) managers do not understand public…
Person:
Year: 2013
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Prescribed Fire, Social Science
Region(s): Northern Rockies, Southern
Keywords: land management, public opinion, climate change, public perceptions

Wildfires can cause immediate and drastic impacts on the structure and functioning of ecosystems, and there has been an increasing interest in wildfire effects on water chemistry and aquatic biota. Wildfires are increasingly recognized as a diffuse source of contamination of…
Person:
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Topic(s): Aquatic, Emissions and Smoke, Fire Effects, Fire Occurrence
Region(s): International
Keywords: wildfires, ash, chemical elements, PAH - polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, ecotoxicological effects, freshwater organisms, water chemistry, Portugal, fire frequency, bacteria, hydrocarbons, toxicity, water quality, fire management, forest management

The British Columbia Asthma Monitoring System (BCAMS) tracks forest fire smoke exposure and asthma-related health outcomes, identifying excursions beyond expected daily counts. Weekly reports during the wildfire season support public health and emergency management decision-…
Person:
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES, TTRS
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Monitoring and Inventory, Safety
Region(s): International
Keywords: Canada, British Columbia, asthma, PM2.5, wildfires, PM - particulate matter, exposure, public health, season of fire, air quality, diseases, particulates, fire management, smoke management

The Wildland Fire Emissions Information System (WFEIS) was developed under NASA Carbon Cycle Science and Applications programs to provide a consistent approach to estimating emissions at continental to sub-continental scales (see http://wfeis.mtri.org). We present an overview of…
Person:
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Fire Behavior, Intelligence, Monitoring and Inventory
Region(s): Alaska, California, Eastern, Great Basin, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Southern, Southwest
Keywords: WFEIS - Wildland Fire Emissions Information System, web-based system, tools, wildfires, wildland fire, fuel consumption, burned area, CO2 - carbon dioxide

Most of climate change is understood in terms of global-scale warming caused by carbon dioxide released from anthropogenic combustion of fossil fuels. Climate models predict slow but steady warming over the next five to ten decades. Developing fire and smoke management…
Person:
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Climate, Emissions and Smoke, Fire Prevention, Models, Planning
Region(s): Alaska, California, Eastern, Great Basin, Hawaii, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Southern, Southwest, International, National
Keywords: fire management, smoke management, climate change, arctic warming

The International Smoke Symposium was held in Hyattsville, Maryland at the University of Maryland University College, USA, October 21-24, 2013. The objective of this symposium was to bring together air quality, fire, and smoke specialists from the research community, non-…
Person:
Year: 2015
Type: Document
Source: FRAMES
Topic(s): Emissions and Smoke, Fire Behavior, Mapping, Models, Monitoring and Inventory, Prescribed Fire, Safety
Region(s): Alaska, California, Eastern, Great Basin, Hawaii, Northern Rockies, Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Southern, Southwest, International, National
Keywords: conference proceedings, fire management, smoke management, smoke exposure