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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
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, California, USA
Department of Geography, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA
Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois, USA
Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
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 NOx as air descends in regions far from the fires.
Received 10 October 2006; accepted 28 February 2007; published 26 May 2007.
Citation: (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.
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