AAAR 36th Annual Conference October 16 - October 20, 2017 Raleigh Convention Center Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Abstract View
Regional Air Quality Modeling of Wildfires for Health Assessments over the Continental United States
CESUNICA IVEY, Cong Liu, Ashley Pierce, Yang Liu, Howard Chang, Matthew Strickland, Heather Holmes, University of Nevada Reno
Abstract Number: 178 Working Group: Regional and Global Air Quality and Climate Modeling
Abstract Human exposure to wildfire smoke is difficult to estimate both at the individual and regional levels due to uncertainties in wildfire smoke modeling and the spatial heterogeneity of fuel composition leading to uncertainties in fire emissions classification. Hence, in this work we incorporated wildfire emissions from the Fire Inventory of NCAR (FINN) into the CMAQ modeling framework, with the goal of improving modeled estimates of the chemical composition of the wildfire emissions and the transport of the related primary and secondary pollutants. FINN emissions have a higher spatial and temporal correlation with observed fire activity, due to the use of MODIS active fire products in the inventory development. We present a three-year evaluation of CMAQ simulations over the continental U.S., for which FINN emissions replace the wildfire emissions in the National Emissions Inventory. Simulated concentrations of bulk fine particulate matter (PM2.5), PM2.5 components (e.g., organic carbon, elemental carbon, and trace metals), and ozone are evaluated by comparing the estimates with observations from regulatory monitoring networks. Regional estimates of PM2.5, PM2.5 components, and ozone provide surrogate metrics for human exposure to wildfire smoke around and down-wind of active fires.