Biomass Burning and Natural Emissions in the Amazon Rainforest: Impact on the Oxidative Capacity of the Atmosphere

Abstract:

Terrestrial vegetation, especially tropical forests, releases large amounts of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC) into the atmosphere. The global emissions of BVOC (~1000 Tg C/year) are dominant in relation to anthropogenic volatile organic compounds (~100 Tg C/year), with biomass burning contributing close to 10 - 50 Tg C/year. Tropical trees cover about 18% of the global land surface but are estimated to be responsible for approximately 80% of terpenoid and 50% of other BVOCs emissions. Considering the importance of these emissions, the SAMBBA (South American Biomass Burning Analysis) experiment, which occurred during the dry season (September 2012) in the Amazon Rainforest, provided information about the chemical composition of the atmosphere through measurements on the aircraft FAAM BAE-146. Although primarily focused on biomass burning flights, the SAMBBA project carried out other flights providing indirect oxidative capacity data in different environments: natural emission dominated flights and biomass burning flights with fresh plumes (< 2 hours) and aged plumes (> 2 hours). Calculation of the [MVK+MACR]/[Isoprene] ratio enabled investigation of the impact of biomass burning on surface oxidation in comparison to the natural emission flights. During the morning (altitude < 500m), the [MVK+MACR]/[Isoprene] values for natural emission flights (1.0±0.4), fresh plume (1.9±0.6) and aged plume (1.4±0.6) suggest that biomass burning enhances BVOC oxidation in relation to the lifetime of the air mass. This study aims to improve the knowledge about the oxidative capacity of the atmosphere, which depends not only on chemical composition, but also other factors like the history of the air mass trajectories influencing the availability of these compounds, the NO_x dependence of isoprene oxidation and whether the chemistry is dominated by OH or O₃. A synergistic approach integrating observation and modeling, using 3D numerical model of chemical transport (CCATT-BRAMS) coupled with a natural emission model (MEGAN) has been applied to study the BVOC in the Amazon rainforest. The SAMBBA experiment provided a valuable database that is being included into a numerical model of air quality, developing a numerical model that incorporates the understanding needed to represent the observations.