Modeling Wildfire Plume Chemistry using the GECKO-A Box Model
Abstract
We present a detailed analysis of the gas phase chemistry in fire plumes sampled during the 2018 Western wildfire Experiment for Cloud chemistry, Aerosol absorption and Nitrogen (WE-CAN) field campaign. More than 20 different wildfires were sampled using the NCAR/NSF C-130 aircraft, equipped with a state-of-the-art instrument suite for atmospheric chemical composition. The hyper explicit Generator of Explicit Chemistry and Kinetics of Organics in the Atmosphere (GECKO-A) box model is used to simulate plume chemistry and to predict the product distribution in selected plumes. The model predictions are then compared to the ambient measurements, a process that provides additional constraints on the fraction of reactive carbon actually measured by the suite of instrumentation deployed on the aircraft. We find that the chemistry in the plumes can be very rapid, with simulated hydroxyl radical (OH) mixing ratios that reach into the 107 cm-3 range. Finally, we attempt to use fire laboratory and other field data to reconstruct the un-sampled chemistry which has already occurred between the time of emission and the first sampling pass of the aircraft, which during WE-CAN often exceeded 30 minutes.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMA255...07F
- Keywords:
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- 0305 Aerosols and particles;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0325 Evolution of the atmosphere;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0365 Troposphere: composition and chemistry;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0368 Troposphere: constituent transport and chemistry;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE