10th International Aerosol Conference September 2 - September 7, 2018 America's Center Convention Complex St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Abstract View
Chemical Characterization of Biomass Burning Aerosols: Can We Reduce the Complexity of Primary Aerosol Emissions?
ALESSANDRO FRANCHIN, Ann M. Middlebrook, Gabriela Adler, Matthew Coggon, Joost de Gouw, Jessica Gilman, Abigail Koss, Jesse Kroll, Kara D. Lamb, Christopher Lim, James Roberts, Joshua P. Schwarz, Kanako Sekimoto, Vanessa Selimovic, Chelsea Stockwell, Nick Wagner, Carsten Warneke, Rebecca Washenfelder, Caroline Womack, Robert J. Yokelson, Bin Yuan, CU CIRES - NOAA ESRL
Abstract Number: 1028 Working Group: Carbonaceous Aerosol
Abstract Aerosols emitted by fires influence the Earth’s radiative budget and play a key role in degrading air quality. Their effects range from a local to a global scales. In the near future, drier conditions and an increase in average temperatures will very likely increase the frequency and magnitude of wild fires. Despite a large effort by the scientific community, aerosols emitted by open-burning fires are still not completely understood and characterized. The challenges are related to the complexity and variability of emissions. In fact, biomass-burning emissions show great differences depending on fire and environmental conditions, fuel type, and aging of the plume.
With our study, we analyze an extensive set of laboratory burns with the goal of understanding, and possibly reducing this complexity. We show the time-resolved chemical composition of the aerosols generated by laboratory fires during the NOAA 2016 FIREX measurement campaign at the Missoula Fire Science Laboratory. During the campaign, we sampled emissions from more than 35 different fuels relevant for the Western United States using an Aerosol Mass Spectrometer at high time resolution (<1 s). We show how the chemical composition of the biomass-burning aerosol changes in different phases of the fire for different burns. We highlight similarities and differences between different fuels, different stages of the fires and different fuel type (e.g., canopy vs. litter vs. duff). We compare our results with the results obtained by using a positive matrix factorization analysis for the gas phase volatile organic compounds, with an attempt to link the gas phase to the aerosol phase emissions. Finally, we compare the time-resolved and the fire-integrated results. Our final aim is to provide tools for a better parametrization of primary emissions from biomass burning.