Comparison of Biomass Burning Smoke Plume Models
Abstract
Biomass burning is known to inject considerable quantities of trace gases into the atmosphere. Recent laboratory, field, and modeling studies have shown that significant atmospheric transformations occur within the vicinity of fire events before these emissions are released into the regional atmosphere. Understanding the local-scale transformations is an important parameter for inclusion into larger, global tropospheric models. An inter-model comparison was carried out between two independently developed zero-dimensional, gas-phase tropospheric models used to describe the photochemical evolution of young biomass burning smoke plumes. One of these models was developed and operated at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany; the second was constructed at the University of Montana- Missoula and is currently run at SUNY Fredonia. Identical initial parameters used in both models were taken from field measurements of biomass burning events under very different fire conditions (African savanna and Alaskan forest/shrub/bog mixture). The Fredonia model predicts slightly different chemistry than the Mainz model, which results in higher radical concentrations and lower PAN production when the same initial conditions are applied. Differences in the simulated results may be attributed to subtle differences in the calculation of photolytic rate constants and the modeled tropospheric chemistry. We survey the differences in model construction and the outcomes.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2003
- Bibcode:
- 2003AGUFM.A22C1081C
- Keywords:
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- 0300 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0317 Chemical kinetic and photochemical properties;
- 0365 Troposphere: composition and chemistry;
- 3307 Boundary layer processes