A255-07
Modeling Wildfire Plume Chemistry using the GECKO-A Box Model
Thursday, 17 December 2020: 07:24
Virtual
Frank M Flocke1, John Joseph Orlando2, Julia M Lee-Taylor3, Andrew John Weinheimer4, Denise D Montzka1, Geoffrey S Tyndall5, Teresa Lynn Campos5, Eric C Apel1, Rebecca S Hornbrook1, Alan J Hills2, Samuel R Hall6, Kirk Ullmann7, Wade Permar8, Lu Hu9, Joel A Thornton10, Brett B. Palm11, Qiaoyun Peng12, Vanessa Selimovic13, I-Ting Ku14, Amy Sullivan15, Jeffrey Lee Collett Jr16, Jakob Lindaas17 and Emily Fischer18, (1)National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States, (2)NCAR, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)NCAR-ACD, Boulder, CO, United States, (4)NCAR, Atmospheric Chemistry Observations and Modeling Laboratory, Boulder, CO, United States, (5)Natl Ctr Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States, (6)NCAR, Denver, CO, United States, (7)National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Atmospheric Chemistry Observations and Modeling Laboratory, Boulder, CO, United States, (8)University of Montana, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Missoula, MT, United States, (9)Univ of MN-Soil, Water, & Clim, St. Paul, MN, United States, (10)University of Washington, Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Seattle, WA, United States, (11)University of Washington, Atmospheric Sciences, Seattle, WA, United States, (12)California State University Northridge, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Northridge, CA, United States, (13)University of Montana, Department of Chemistry, Missoula, MT, United States, (14)Colorado State University, Atmospheric Science, Fort Collins, United States, (15)Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, United States, (16)Colorado State University, Atmospheric Science, Fort Collins, CO, United States, (17)Harvard University, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Cambridge, MA, United States, (18)Colorado State University, Department of Atmospheric Science, Fort Collins, CO, United States
Abstract:
We present a detailed analysis of the gas phase chemistry in fire plumes sampled during the 2018 Western wildfire Experiment for Cloud chemistry, Aerosol absorption and Nitrogen (WE-CAN) field campaign. More than 20 different wildfires were sampled using the NCAR/NSF C-130 aircraft, equipped with a state-of-the-art instrument suite for atmospheric chemical composition. The hyper explicit Generator of Explicit Chemistry and Kinetics of Organics in the Atmosphere (GECKO-A) box model is used to simulate plume chemistry and to predict the product distribution in selected plumes. The model predictions are then compared to the ambient measurements, a process that provides additional constraints on the fraction of reactive carbon actually measured by the suite of instrumentation deployed on the aircraft. We find that the chemistry in the plumes can be very rapid, with simulated hydroxyl radical (OH) mixing ratios that reach into the 107 cm-3 range. Finally, we attempt to use fire laboratory and other field data to reconstruct the un-sampled chemistry which has already occurred between the time of emission and the first sampling pass of the aircraft, which during WE-CAN often exceeded 30 minutes.
