American Association for Aerosol Research - Abstract Submission

AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA

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Projecting the Impacts of Climate Change on Wildfire-driven Air Quality over the Southeastern U.S

UMA SHANKAR, Jeffrey Prestemon, Aijun Xiu, Kevin Talgo, Bok Baek, Dongmei Yang, Mohammad Omary, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract Number: 529
Working Group: Biomass Burning Aerosol: From Emissions to Impacts

Abstract
Under the Forest and Rangeland Renewable Resources Planning Act (RPA) of 1974, the Forest Service and other federal agencies are required to generate national RPA Assessment reports on a ten-year cycle, describing projected conditions of the US forest and rangeland in the next 50 years. In support of this goal, analyses were conducted to project the impacts of climate change on annual areas burned (AAB) using global climate model projections of fire weather parameters corresponding to the latest projection time frame, 2010-2060. The climate data were remapped to a modeling domain over the Southeastern U.S. to develop statistical models that project fire activity in contemporary and future periods. These theoretically based models recognize not only the changes in driving climate variables but also those in biophysical, socioeconomic, and land use variables that have been shown to explain wildfire historical variations in time and space. They have been applied to yield corresponding wildfire AAB projections, gridded over the spatial domain, at 5-year intervals from 2015 to 2060. The AAB projections have been used in a stochastic model to constrain estimates of daily burned areas for the eventual estimation of wildfire emissions in selected years. Air quality simulations are being conducted in these years with the coupled WRF-CMAQ model to examine the impacts of wildfires on air quality, and on the feedback of aerosols formed in wildfires to the atmospheric dynamics. Results are presented for available years on the ambient concentrations of aerosols and ozone, and boundary layer characteristics.