Impacts of enhanced biomass burning in the boreal forests in 1998 on tropospheric chemistry and the sensitivity of model results to the injection height of emissions

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Read Full Article (file size: 679362 bytes) Cited by JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 112, D10313, doi:10.1029/2006JD008132, 2007 Impacts of enhanced biomass burning in the boreal forests in 1998 on tropospheric chemistry and the sensitivity of model results to the injection height of emissions Fok-Yan T. Leung School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA Jennifer A. Logan School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA Rokjin Park School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA Edward Hyer Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, California, USA Eric Kasischke Department of Geography, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA David Streets Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois, USA Leonid Yurganov Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland, USA Abstract Carbon monoxide reached record high levels in the northern extratropics in the late summer and fall of 1998 as a result of anomalously large boreal fires in eastern Russia and North America. We investigated the effects of these fires on CO and tropospheric oxidants using a global chemical transport model (GEOS-Chem) and two independently derived inventories for the fire emissions that differ by a factor of two. We find that it is essential to use both surface and column observations of CO to constrain the magnitude of the fire emissions and their injection altitude. Our results show that the larger of the two inventories appears more reliable and that about half of the emissions were injected above the boundary layer. The boreal fire emissions cause a much larger enhancement in ozone when about half the emissions are released above the boundary layer than when they are released exclusively in the boundary layer, as a consequence of the role of PAN as a source of NO_x as air descends in regions far from the fires. Received 10 October 2006; accepted 28 February 2007; published 26 May 2007. Keywords: carbon monoxide; boreal forest fires; biomass burning. Index Terms: 0368 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Troposphere: constituent transport and chemistry; 0365 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Troposphere: composition and chemistry; 0322 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Constituent sources and sinks. Read Full Article (file size: 679362 bytes) Cited by Citation: Leung, F.-Y. T., J. A. Logan, R. Park, E. Hyer, E. Kasischke, D. Streets, and L. Yurganov (2007), Impacts of enhanced biomass burning in the boreal forests in 1998 on tropospheric chemistry and the sensitivity of model results to the injection height of emissions, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D10313, doi:10.1029/2006JD008132. Copyright 2007 by the American Geophysical Union.

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