Using Geostationary aerosol products to characterize the Spatial and Temporal Variabilities in Biomass Burning Emissions During FIREX-AQ Field Campaign

Geostationary (GEO) satellite aerosol products, which provides wide spatial and fine temporal data coverage, can be used to study fast-evolving smoke emitted from biomass burning (BB) events. However, the representativeness of GEO products for individual BB events requires further investigations. The Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) experiment, over the Western U.S. during the summer of 2019, provided a great opportunity to evaluate the ability for GEO to retrieve the spatial-temporal variability of smoke. Specifically, we applied a version of the dark-target (DT) aerosol retrieval algorithm, used for retrievals on Moderate Imaging Resolution Spectroradiometer (MODIS), to the two geostationary sensors (Advanced Baseline Imagers (ABI) on GOES-E and GOES-W) and an airborne sensor (the enhanced-MODIS simulator (eMAS) on the ER-2). Since the ER-2 often flew multiple tracks over individual fires, this provided a unique opportunity to observe the temporal variability of the resulting smoke. We specifically focused on retrievals over the Williams Flat Fire (northeast Washington State) on August 6-8, 2019, and the Little Bear Fire (southwest Utah State) on August 20, 2019, thereby exploring the spatial variability within and surrounding the smoke plumes at a variety of spatial and temporal resolutions. With multiple eMAS flight tracks and multiple GEO images over the same fire plume, we aim to quantify and generalize the ability of GEO to observe the spatial and temporal variability of BB smoke.