Abstract
The ‘Black Saturday’ fires were a series of devastating forest fires that burned across Victoria, Australia, during February and March of 2009. In this study we have used satellite data made publically available by NASA from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) and the Atmospheric InfraRed Sounder (AIRS) to track the smoke plume from the Black Saturday firestorm and explore the chemical aging of the smoke plume in the first days after emission. We also determined emission ratios for formaldehyde and nitrogen dioxide within smoke from fires actively burning across Victoria between 7 and 17 February 2009. The mean emission ratios with respect to carbon monoxide derived for these two tropospheric ozone precursors are (0.016 ± 0.004 mol.mol−1) for formaldehyde and (0.005 ± 0.002 mol.mol−1) for nitrogen dioxide. The mean emission ratio for formaldehyde with respect to CO is in broad agreement with values previously quoted in the literature for temperate forest fires. However, to our knowledge there are no previous measurements of emission ratios for nitrogen dioxide from Australian temperate forest fires.
Highlights
Biomass burning releases trace gases and aerosol particles into the atmosphere with consequences for atmospheric chemistry and climate
The mean emission ratio derived in this work for H2CO with respect to Carbon monoxide (CO) of 0.016 ± 0.004 is in broad agreement with the two previous published values for Australian forest fires
We have presented emission ratios with respect to CO for the tropospheric ozone precursors H2CO
Summary
Biomass burning releases trace gases and aerosol particles into the atmosphere with consequences for atmospheric chemistry and climate. The Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) is carried onboard Aura and consists of two grating spectrometers that record daily global measurements of solar radiation backscattered from the Earth and the Earth’s atmosphere in the wavelength range of 270–500 nm with a spatial resolution of 13 × 24 km in global mode [21] From this information OMI determines column amounts of trace gases including H2CO (measured at spectral resolution of 0.45 nm in the UV-2: 310–365 nm) and NO2. Mebust et al [34] used OMI tropospheric NO2 in conjunction with Fire Radiative Power from the MODIS instrument to characterize the emissions of NO2 from different vegetation fires in California and Nevada, but satellite-based measurements of smoke plumes are still an under-utilized resource for characterizing emissions from data poor regions of the Southern Hemisphere. Based sensor measurements of emission ratios from the Black Saturday fires are interesting because they provide a means of characterising the emissions from the most intense wildfires
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