Optimizing the synergism between airborne and satellite observations for characterizing fire energetics and smoke emissions during FIREX-AQ 2019

Abstract:

Wildfires and other types of biomass burning are a seasonal phenomenon in different land ecosystems around the world. These fires are estimated to consume biomass containing a total of 2-5 petagrams of carbon globally every year, generating heat energy, and emitting smoke plumes that comprise different species of aerosols and trace gases. These emissions can have adverse effects on human health, air quality, and environmental processes. Although less than 5% of global fires occur in North America, recent studies have shown steady and significant increases in burned areas over the last few decades across the continent, especially in the western US.

Fire emission products based on fire radiative power (FRP) observations from satellite have been found to be useful for various earth-system and air-quality modeling applications. However, major global fire emissions datasets derived from FRP or other satellite observations of active fire detections or post-fire burned areas have been found to disagree widely in all biomass burning regions of the world, particularly in North America. NOAA and NASA teamed up in a major initiative with the fire research community to conduct a series of research activities aimed at improving scientific understanding of fire and smoke distributions, characteristics, and impacts in the US. These efforts culminated in a major airborne/field campaign – Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) – conducted during the summer of 2019. The synergistic airborne remote-sensing of fires and in situ sampling of smoke constituents across the US during FIREX-AQ, complemented by a variety of modeling activities at different scales, offer great promise in resolving some of the ambiguities associated with the large disagreements in the satellite-derived emissions datasets in North America. In this presentation, we will discuss preliminary results of the analysis of satellite and airborne fire remote sensing, particularly from the MASTER instrument aboard the NASA DC-8 flying laboratory, and show how these data can help in the effort to reduce uncertainty in smoke emissions estimations.