Satellite Characterization of Fire Emissions of Aerosols and Gases Relevant to Air-Quality Modeling

Abstract:

Because of the transient and widespread nature of wildfires and other types of open biomass burning, satellite remote sensing has become an indispensable technique for characterizing their smoke emissions for modeling applications, especially at regional to global scales. Fire radiative energy (FRE), whose instantaneous rate of release or fire radiative power (FRP) is measurable from space, has been found to be proportional to both the biomass consumption and emission of aerosol particulate matter. We have leveraged this relationship to generate a global, gridded smoke-aerosol emission coefficients (C_e) dataset based on FRP and aerosol optical thickness (AOT) measurements from the MODIS sensors aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites. C_e is a simple coefficient to convert FRE to smoke aerosol emissions, in the same manner as traditional emission factors are used to convert burned biomass to emissions. The first version of this Fire Energetics and Emissions Research (FEER.v1) global gridded C_e product at 1°x1° resolution is available at http://feer.gsfc.nasa.gov/. Based on published emission ratios, the FEER.v1 C_e product for total smoke aerosol has also been used to generate similar products for specific fire-emitted aerosols and gases, including those that are regulated as ‘criteria pollutants’ under the US Environmental Protection Agency’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), such as particulate matter (PM) and carbon monoxide (CO). These gridded C_e products were used in conjunction with satellite measurements of FRP to derive emissions of several smoke constituents, which were applied to WRF-Chem fully coupled meteorology-chemistry-aerosol model simulations, with promising results. In this presentation, we analyze WRF-Chem simulations of surface-level concentrations of various pollutants based on FEER.v1 emission products to illustrate their value for air-quality modeling, particularly in parts of Africa and southeast Asia where ground-based air-quality monitoring is limited or absent.