Recent Innovations in the BlueSky Smoke Modeling Framework and Assessment of Plume Injection Height with MISR and CALIPSO

The BlueSky Smoke Modeling Framework (BlueSky) enables the simulation of cumulative smoke impacts from wildland, prescribed, and agricultural fires across a region. BlueSky enabled predictive models have been implemented across the United States and western Canada for real-time air quality forecasting. BlueSky is also used retrospectively to develop the open burning portion of the US EPA National Emission Inventory. BlueSky is not a model itself, but an open-source, modular framework for linking state-of-the-science models of meteorology, fuels, consumption, emissions, and transport. While there are a large and growing number of models for each step of the smoke modeling chain, for many of them, relatively little intercomparison or validation against observed data sets has been performed. The Smoke and Emissions Model Intercomparison Project (SEMIP) is an ongoing community effort to intercompare and evaluate the growing number of fire and smoke emissions models. SEMIP is designed to be of use to both the scientific and management communities who need model performance comparisons to be able to better focus new model development and to be able to better utilize existing model output. In this poster we present the BlueSky framework and a sampling of results from SEMIP. In particular, plume injection height schemes available in BlueSky were validated against plume top height data derived from the Multi-angle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR) onboard Terra and the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthgonal Polarization (CALIOP) instrument onboard CALIPSO. Plume injection height has significant impact on predicted downwind ground-level concentrations of pollutants.