AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA
Abstract View
Constraints on Smoke Injection Height, Source Strength, and Transports from MISR and MODIS
RALPH KAHN, Maria Val Martin, Mariya Petrenko, Mian Chin, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Abstract Number: 281 Working Group: Biomass Burning Aerosol: From Emissions to Impacts
Abstract Multi-angle and multispectral satellite observations have produced some constraints on smoke source characteristics and downwind transports, globally. Injection height and source strength are the two key quantities used to parameterize aerosol sources in chemical transport and climate models. We are able to map smoke injection height near-source by applying stereo retrieval techniques to multi-angle imaging from MISR. These maps, combined with downwind smoke plume layer height from the space-based CALIPSO lidar, provide fairly strong constraints on smoke vertical distribution for transport modeling. However, important questions remain about how to physically model the injection height process, for which the dynamical heat flux of the fire, the atmospheric stability structure, and the plume entrainment process must be represented with sufficient accuracy.
We also compared snapshots of near-source smoke plume aerosol optical depth (AOD) from MODIS and MISR with GoCART aerosol transport model runs, initialized with different smoke emission inventories. Systematic, regional consistency regarding the places where the model AOD, sampled at satellite overpass times and initialized with different inventories, underestimate, overestimate, and agree with the observations. These results provide a useful guide to source strength representation by the inventories used, at least in the context of the GoCART model. We are developing full-year data sets for both the injection height and plume-specific AOD retrievals, to be used in a more extensive modeling exercise with the AeroCom group. One remaining question asks about the large-scale environmental impacts of smoke from numerous, small fires that cannot be detected from space.