A23E:
Extreme Wildfires and Smoke Plumes: Past, Present, and Future I


Submit an Abstract to this Session


Session ID#: 58344

Session Description:
Recent boreal wildfire seasons have punctuated an apparent evolution toward greater anomalies in wildfire behavior, explosive pyroconvection, and hemisphere-scale smoke plumes.  A 2017 wildfire complex in Canada generated pyrocumulonimbus storms and  a stratospheric smoke plume comparable to a large volcanic eruption. Fires in Oklahoma this year consumed 127,880 ha, destroyed 60+ buildings, and generated a smoke plume transported at least 4,500 km.  Such fire-behavior and fire-weather extremes may become more commonplace in a changing climate. This session will assess the impact of these and other extreme fire events on communities, weather, and climate.  We solicit reports on specific fire events and anomalous smoke plumes in general. Contributions to this session will address the challenges imposed on remote sensing systems by extreme fire events, the hemispheric atmospheric impact, and our modeling/predictive capability.  We solicit contributions on measurement and modeling perspectives into extreme wildfire phenomena: past, present, and future.
Primary Convener:  Michael D Fromm, US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, United States
Convener:  Peter Richard Colarco, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States
Primary Liaison:  Michael D Fromm, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, United States
Chairs:  Michael D Fromm, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, United States and Peter Richard Colarco, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States
OSPA Liaison:  Michael D Fromm, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, United States
Index Terms:

0305 Aerosols and particles [ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE]
0340 Middle atmosphere: composition and chemistry [ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE]
3311 Clouds and aerosols [ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES]

Abstracts Submitted to this Session:

The Long-Lived Plume of the Pacific Northwest PyroCb Event: Composition Evolution from MLS Observations (447822)
Michael J Schwartz, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, Hugh C Pumphrey, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom and George P Kablick, US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, United States
Airborne Observations Of Aerosol Absorption and Brown Carbon In Wildfire Emissions During The WE-CAN 2018 Field Campaign (461579)
Shane M Murphy, University of Wyoming, Atmospheric Science, Laramie, WY, United States, Rudra P Pokhrel, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, United States and Matthew D Burkhart, University of Wyoming, Atmospheric Science, Laramie, United States
Unprecedented NH3 emissions detected in the high-Arctic from the 2017 Canadian wildfires (435306)
Erik Lutsch1, Kimberly Strong1, Dylan B. A. Jones1, Ivan Ortega2, James W Hannigan3, Enrico Dammers4, Mark Shephard4, Eleanor Rose Morris5, Killian Murphy6, Mathew J Evans7, Mark Parrington8, Simon Whitburn9, Martin Van Damme10, Lieven Clarisse11, Pierre-Francois Coheur11, Cathy Clerbaux12, Betty Croft13, Randall Martin14, Greg Wentworth15, Lei Zhu16 and Jenny A Fisher17, (1)University of Toronto, Department of Physics, Toronto, ON, Canada, (2)NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NSF NCAR), Atmospheric Chemistry Observations & Modeling Laboratory (ACOM), Boulder, CO, United States, (3)National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States, (4)Environment and Climate Change Canada, Air Quality Research Division, Toronto, ON, Canada, (5)University of York, Department of Chemistry, York, YO10, United Kingdom, (6)University of York, Department of Chemistry, York, United Kingdom, (7)University of York, Wolfson Atmospheric Chemistry Laboratories, Department of Chemistry, York, United Kingdom, (8)European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, United Kingdom, (9)Université Libre de Bruxelles, Spectroscopie de l’Atmosphère, Service de Chimie Quantique et Photophysique, Brussels, Belgium, (10)Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, Brussels, Belgium, (11)Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Spectroscopy, Quantum Chemistry and Atmospheric Remote Sensing (SQUARES), Brussels, Belgium, (12)LATMOS/IPSL, Sorbonne Université, UVSQ, CNRS, Paris, France, (13)Dalhousie University, Physics & Atmospheric Science, Halifax, NS, Canada, (14)Dalhousie University, Physics and Atmospheric Science, Halifax, Canada, (15)Alberta Environment and Parks, Environmental Monitoring and Science Division, Edmonton, Canada, (16)Harvard University, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, United States, (17)School of Earth & Environmental Sciences and School of Chemistry, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
Wildfire-Driven Thunderstorms Cause a Volcano-Like Stratospheric Injection of Smoke (353467)
David A Peterson1, James R Campbell2, Edward J Hyer3, Michael D Fromm4, George P Kablick5, Joshua Cossuth4 and Matthew T DeLand6, (1)Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, United States, (2)Naval Research Laboratory, Marine Meteorology Division, Monterey, CA, United States, (3)Naval Research Laboratory, Marine Meteorology Division, Monterey, United States, (4)US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, United States, (5)US Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, United States, (6)Sci Systems & Applications Inc, Lanham, MD, United States
Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future: Wildfires are burning bigger, hotter, and in increasingly unpredictable ways. Policy-makers and the public have been slow to respond to this new paradigm. The need to invest in wildfire science is needed to give firefighters and forested communities the tools required to deal with future fires. (Invited) (374462)
Edward Struzik, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada
Impact of August 2017 British Columbia Pyrocumulonimbus Injection Events on Lower Stratospheric Composition (409405)
Luke Oman1, Olga Tweedy2, Peter Richard Colarco1, Sampa Das3, Ghassan Taha4, Anne R Douglass5, Michael D Fromm6 and David A Peterson7, (1)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (2)Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States, (3)NASA Post-doctoral Program, Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, MD, United States, (4)Morgan State University, NASA/code 614, Baltimore, MD, United States, (5)NASA Goddard SFC, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (6)Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, United States, (7)Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, United States
The Three-dimensional Evolution of Smoke Aerosols Emitted During the 2017 Pyrocumulonimbus Events over British Columbia (409419)
Sampa Das1, Peter Richard Colarco2, Luke Oman3, Olga Tweedy4, Ghassan Taha5, Omar Torres2 and David A Peterson6, (1)NASA Post-doctoral Program, Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, MD, United States, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, United States, (4)Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States, (5)Morgan State University, NASA/code 614, Baltimore, MD, United States, (6)Marine Meteorology Division, Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, United States

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