Implementing a new entrainment scheme within the smoke plume rise parameterization

The plume rise model is embedded into several chemistry transport models and computes the smoke plume injection height for the host model to release the fire emissions at that altitude. This parameterization has been improved recently in order to include fire size and fire radiative power from remote sensing to calculate the convective heat flux associated to the smoke plume. In addition, we add Gregory (2000) entrainment scheme to account for the lateral entrainment of the environmental air that the plume suffers during its rise. For this, we analyzed the fires detected via remote sensing in Africa and North America during recent field experiments such as ORACLES and FIREX-AQ. Results show that the different versions of the plume rise model estimate the plume injection heights fairly well in both regions, with biases of +/- 500 m when compared to MISR observations. The impact of including this entrainment scheme is more visible when Pyro-Cumulonimbus were evaluated. In general, results for the African region show a weaker variation or dependence to the plume rise parameterization than in North America, due to a very well developed boundary layer during the day, with heights up to 5 km. However, we show that the plume rise parameterization is determinant to estimate the injection heights for plumes that break shallower boundary layer heights in this region.