A224-0011
Low molecular weight oxygenated volatile organic compound (OVOC) emissions during FIREX-AQ: Distributions, reactivity, chemical evolution, and comparison with other measurements

Wednesday, 16 December 2020
Poster
Eric C Apel1, Rebecca S Hornbrook2, Alan J Hills3, Donald Ray Blake4, Simone Meinardi4, Barbara Barletta4, Isobel J Simpson4, Nicola J Blake4, Alex Jarnot4, Christopher Woods4, Glenn S Diskin5, Alan Fried6, Dirk Richter6, Petter Weibring6, Glenn M Wolfe7, Thomas F Hanisco8, John B Nowak9, Hannah S Halliday10, Jessica Gilman11, Aaron Lamplugh12, Matthew Mitchell Coggon13, Kanako Sekimoto14, Carsten Warneke12, Robert J Yokelson15, Joshua P DiGangi9, Georgios Gkatzelis16, Vanessa Selimovic15, Brenna Biggs4, Jason M St Clair17, Reem A Hannun18, James Walega6, Jin Liao19 and FIREX-AQ Science Team, (1)University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States, (2)National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)NCAR, Boulder, CO, United States, (4)University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States, (5)NASA Langley Research Ctr, Hampton, VA, United States, (6)University of Colorado at Boulder, Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Boulder, CO, United States, (7)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (8)NASA GSFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (9)NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, United States, (10)Universities Space Research Association Columbia, Columbia, MD, United States, (11)NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Chemical Sciences Laboratory, Boulder, CO, United States, (12)CIRES and NOAA ESRL, Chemical Sciences Laboratory, Boulder, CO, United States, (13)California Institute of Technology, Department of Chemical Engineering, Pasadena, CA, United States, (14)NOAA Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (15)University of Montana, Department of Chemistry, Missoula, MT, United States, (16)Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Jülich 52428, Germany, (17)University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, United States, (18)Harvard Univ/Anderson Group, Cambridge, MA, United States, (19)Universities Space Research Association and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States
Abstract:
The NASA/NOAA FIREX-AQ mission employed the NASA DC-8 aircraft in sampling wildfires during the 2019 fire season. In part one of the mission, fires were sampled in the western US and in part two, agricultural fires were sampled in the southeastern US. During FIREX-AQ, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) VOC measurements group deployed the Trace Organic Gas Analyzer (TOGA) which was recently fitted with a time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOGA-TOF). The system continuously sampled during the mission’s 23 DC-8 research flights, typically providing 30-second integrated measurements every 105 seconds of approximately 80 VOCs. The compounds include HCN, acetonitrile and other organic nitriles, formaldehyde and other oxygenated VOCs including furans, alkanes, aromatics, halocarbons, and alkyl nitrates. Here we focus on the measurements of low molecular weight OVOCs, including formaldehyde, which are directly emitted from fires but also can be formed in the outflow of the fires from photochemical processing. We report on the performance of the TOGA-TOF during FIREX-AQ which represented the first deployment of the instrument. The importance of the low molecular weight OVOCs is examined in the context of fire emissions. Comparisons between other instruments on-board the NASA DC-8 that measured the same species will be presented. In addition we will examine similarities and differences in the FIREX-AQ and WE-CAN low molecular weight OVOC data from western wildfires.
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