Seminar Series:  Impact of Biomass Burning on Climate and Air Quality

Event Date: March 14, 2018

Date: Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Time: 12:00 p.m.

Location: City College of New York, Steinman Hall, Rm. 124

Speaker: Dr. Carsten Warneke

Title: "The Impact of Biomass Burning on Climate and Air Quality: An Intensive Study of Western North America Fires

Abstract:

NOAA’s FIREX campaign is a five-year effort to study North American Wildfires. NOAA and NASA’s large aircraft efforts have recently been consolidated onto NASA’s DC-8 platform into FIREX-AQ (Fire Influence on Regional and Global Environments and Air Quality) to broadly sample North American fires to improve understanding of their emissions and atmospheric impacts. FIREX-AQ will be conducted during wildfire season in the summer of 2019 and coordinated with other agencies bringing various assets to the field. In this presentation we describe all the coordinated activities related to FIREX-AQ that have taken place already or are planned to be coordinated with the DC-8 deployment.

To meet the FIREX-AQ science goals that are difficult to perform with the large DC-8 aircraft, the NOAA CSD will potentially deploy two NOAA Twin Otters to Boise, ID overlapping with the DC-8 in 2019. The first Twin Otter (FIREX-CHEM) could focus on the variability of the emissions measuring close to the fire for extended time periods, the fast evolution of smoke in the first few hours after emission, and will coordinate with the DC-8 that will be flying further downwind to study the chemical evolution on day to multi-day timescales. In addition, the Twin Otter will study the evolution of fire plumes at night. The second NOAA Twin Otter (FIREX-MET) could characterize the horizontal and vertical wind fields and turbulence intensities of wildfires.