AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA
Abstract View
Satellite Characterization of Biomass-Burning Aerosol Emissions for Regional Modeling
CHARLES ICHOKU, Luke Ellison, Jun Wang, Feng Zhang, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Abstract Number: 463 Working Group: Biomass Burning Aerosol: From Emissions to Impacts
Abstract Satellite remote sensing has become an indispensable technique for characterizing smoke aerosol emissions from open biomass burning, especially at regional to global scales, because of the transient and widespread nature of fires. These fires are detected from space because of the intense heat energy they generate and the corresponding smoke plumes that comprise different species of aerosols and trace gases. However, because of the inherent difficulty in quantifying these emissions in a timely fashion using traditional methods, it has hitherto been challenging to parameterize them accurately in models used for biosphere-atmosphere interaction studies or air-quality monitoring and forecasting. Fortunately, a series of recent studies have revealed that both the biomass consumption and emission of aerosol particulate matter by open biomass burning are directly proportional to the fire radiative energy (FRE), whose instantaneous rate of release or fire radiative power (FRP) is measurable from space. We have leveraged this relationship to generate a global, gridded smoke-aerosol emission coefficients (Ce) dataset based on FRP and aerosol optical thickness (AOT) measurements from the MODIS sensors aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites. Ce is a simple coefficient to convert FRE to smoke aerosol emissions, in the same manner as traditional emission factors are used to convert burned biomass to emissions. The first version of this Fire Energetics and Emissions Research (FEER.v1) global Ce product is available at http://feer.gsfc.nasa.gov/. This gridded Ce product at 1°x1° resolution was used in conjunction with satellite measurements of FRP to derive smoke aerosol emissions, which were applied to WRF-Chem fully-coupled meteorology-chemistry-aerosol model simulations in Northern su-Saharan Africa. The results reveal that these FRE-based emissions are able to capture some important regional smoke distribution patterns that may not be adequately represented by using other major emissions inventories, when compared to satellite AOT retrievals.