Overview of the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) 2019 Field Campaign

Abstract:

In summer 2019, NOAA and NASA marshalled resources for an extraordinarily broad campaign to study fires. The combined resources deployed included 4 research aircraft, large ground-based mobile and stationary sampling platforms, dozens of temporary AERO-Net sunphotometers (including 2 mounted in sport utility vehicles along with lidars), and hundreds of researchers and students from Federal and State labs, partnering universities, and private industry. Further, substantial involvement of the satellite remote sensing community, and modelers operating at many different length and time scales, contribute to FIREX-AQ. In phase one of the campaign all of the assets targeted western wildfires: NASA’s DC-8 conducted 13 flights that extensively sampled 16 different fires (several visited on multiple days); NOAA’s Twin Otters flew more than 40 shorter flights to 9 wildfires, 8 of which were not sampled by the DC-8; and NASA’s ER-2 flew 11 flights that tended to be coordinated with insitu sampling by the DC-8 or Twin Otter. The ground based mobile platforms sampled smoke from a subset of the fires targeted by the aircraft, overlapped in time as much as possible. In phase two the DC-8 changed focus to sample smaller fires in the southeast, these were a mix of prescribed burns conducted to meet agricultural and forestry management goals. During 7 flights the DC-8 sampled smoke from 86 distinct fires and the mixed plume from multiple fires that filled the Mississippi River Valley on several afternoons. FIREX-AQ was unique in scale, and in the number of fires in different regions that were studied. Also, the ground-based platforms and Twin Otter conducted extensive nighttime sampling of smoke. And the FIREX-AQ fuels team compiled unprecedented information about the type and amount of biomass that was burned in all of the fires sampled during the campaign. In addition to providing more details about this ambitious field campaign some preliminary highlights from the rich data set will be summarized.