Constraining wildfire emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) with NASA airborne observations

Biomass burning is a significant but mostly under-characterized source for atmospheric volatile organic compounds (VOCs), impacting regional air quality and public health. Once emitted, VOCs play an important role in the formation of ozone and fine particulate matter. Many VOCs and their oxidation products from smoke plumes are air toxics. Current air quality models cannot predict ozone or particulate production in the environment influenced by fire smoke, reflecting our knowledge gap in emission, chemistry, and transport of fire-related air pollutants, including VOCs. The western U.S. is of great interest to us due to recent increasing fire occurrence and severity. This project aims to constrain VOC emissions from western U.S. wildfire smoke using recent NASA airborne observations, building upon the Science Investigator (Sc-I) Hu group’s ongoing research. The overall goal is to answer the fundamental questions: What are the emissions of VOCs from wildfire smoke, and how do they affect air quality?

An ongoing project by Sc-I Hu is the NSF funded WE-CAN 2018 aircraft campaign (https://www.eol.ucar.edu/field_projects/we-can). The WE-CAN campaign systematically characterized the emissions and the first day of evolution of western U.S. wildfire smoke in August 2018 using NSF/NCAR C-130 aircraft. Hu group led the VOC measurements using a proton transfer reaction mass spectrometer (PTR-MS) during WE-CAN. We are currently analyzing the WE-CAN VOC data and planning on reporting VOC emission factors in the western U.S. The NASA and NOAA co-led FIREX-AQ field campaign took place in July – September 2019 (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/csd/projects/firex-aq/). FIREX-AQ deployed the NASA DC-8 aircraft and sampled a broader region in the U.S. wildfire smoke with a similar instrument payload as WE-CAN. Both field campaigns together covered a mixture of fire sizes, fuel types, and burning conditions for the western U.S. They spanned two fire seasons and significantly increased the number and types of fires being comprehensively characterized, thus better capturing the anticipated large natural variability of wildfire emissions. The project will use a combination of recent airborne observations and a 3D chemical transport model (Task 1) to evaluate widely used biomass burning emission inventories, especially NASA maintained QFED (Quick Fire Emissions Dataset). We will examine VOC emissions from western U.S. wildfires, with combined constraints from WE-CAN and FIREX-AQ to improve statistics. We will focus on hazardous air pollutants measured by PTR-MS. We will examine critical uncertainties in biomass burning emission inventories for fire detection and burned areas (Task 2). We will then focus on diagnosing and improving model errors in VOC emission ratios, emission factors, and vertical distribution (Task 3).

This project is in response to Appendix C of the solicitation, Earth Science, and will collaborate with NASA science teams, specifically Dr. Jim Crawford at Langley Research Center, Mission Scientist of FIREX-AQ. It will exploit observations from a recent NASA airborne field campaign and improve the quality of a NASA product for biomass burning emission estimates. Collaborations built on here will further enhance the connection between Montana and NASA. It will foster future collaborative work, particularly on validating NASA satellite products such as TROPOMI and the to-be-launched TEMPO satellites, which is part of the Sc-I’s research theme.

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