Air Quality Impacts during the 2015 Rough Fire in Areas Surrounding the Sierra Nevada, California

Ricardo Cisneros,David Veloz,Hamed Gharibi,Kathleen Navarro,Pooya Tavallali,Donald Schweizer

doi:10.3390/fire4030031

Ricardo Cisneros, David Veloz + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/fire4030031

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Abstract

The Rough Fire started on 31 July 2015 from a lightning strike, spread to over 61,000 ha and burned parts of the Sierra and Sequoia National Forests and the Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, in California. Health advisories for smoke were issued in rural areas around the fire and in urban areas of the Central Valley. PM2.5 concentrations in rural and urban areas were used to assess the air quality impacts from the fire. Before the Rough Fire, 24-h PM2.5 concentrations for all sites ranged from 1 µg m−3o 50 µgm−3. During the wildfire, the 24-h PM2.5 concentrations ranged from 2 µgm−3 to 545 µgm−3, reaching hazardous levels of the federal Air Quality Index (AQI). The results indicate that the largest PM2.5 smoke impacts occurred at locations closer to and downwind of the fire in mountain communities of the Sierra Nevada, while the smoke impacts were lower in the urban areas.

Highlights

Surrounding the Sierra Nevada, Increased fuels from historic wildland fire suppression and climate change lengthening the fire season are creating a post-suppression era where large high-intensity wildland fires are becoming more common and leading to increased smoke exposure [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
The air quality impacts during the Rough Fire were localized in the central Sierra
Fresno PM2.5 increased to 11 μgm−3 and the PM2.5 maximum to 25 μgm−3 ; Clovis PM2.5 increased to 15 μgm−3 and the maximum to 34 μgm−3 ; Madera PM2.5 stayed the same and the maximum increased to 27 μgm−3 ; and Merced’s mean PM2.5 concentration increased to μgm−3 with a maximum of 40 μgm−3

Summary

Introduction

Surrounding the Sierra Nevada, Increased fuels from historic wildland fire suppression and climate change lengthening the fire season are creating a post-suppression era where large high-intensity wildland fires are becoming more common and leading to increased smoke exposure [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. In addition to the loss of property and life that can occur from large high-intensity wildland fires, the smoke from these fires, in an already anthropogenically polluted environment, could have devastating impacts on human respiratory health. We need strategies to allow this natural process on protected wilderness areas while minimizing the impacts to human health from the inevitable release of smoke from a large high-intensity wildland fire when suppression fails

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