Abstract
Biomass burning related aerosol episodes are becoming a serious threat to the radiative balance of the Arctic region. Since early July 2017 intense wildfires were recorded between August and September in Canada and Greenland, covering an area up to 4674 km2 in size. This paper describes the impact of these biomass burning (BB) events measured over Svalbard, using an ensemble of ground-based, columnar, and vertically-resolved techniques. BB influenced the aerosol chemistry via nitrates and oxalates, which exhibited an increase in their concentrations in all of size fractions, indicating the BB origin of particles. The absorption coefficient data (530 nm) at ground reached values up to 0.6 Mm–1, highlighting the impact of these BB events when compared to average Arctic background values, which do not exceed 0.05 Mm–1. The absorption behavior is fundamental as implies a subsequent atmospheric heating. At the same time, the AERONET Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) data showed high values at stations located close to or in Canada (AOD over 2.0). Similarly, increased values of AODs were then observed in Svalbard, e.g., in Hornsund (daily average AODs exceeded 0.14 and reached hourly values up to 0.5). Elevated values of AODs were then registered in Sodankylä and Andenes (daily average AODs exceeding 0.150) a few days after the Svalbard observation of the event highlighting the BB columnar magnitude, which is crucial for the radiative impact. All the reported data suggest to rank the summer 2017 plume of aerosols as one of the biggest atmosphere related environmental problems over Svalbard region in last 10 years.
Highlights
The ongoing climate change is leading to an increase in surface temperatures all over the globe [1]and as a consequence numbers of wild forest fires increase [2]
On 16 and August sea salt was still a dominating component (33% to 42%) and starting on August it was organic matter that took over in the aerosol composition and on 18 August its percentage was 37 and it reached its peak on 21 August with 65%
It may potentially warm the Arctic if it is located immediately close to the ground, a larger number ofispoints a longer time should improve thethe statistics of thisofcomparison
Summary
The ongoing climate change is leading to an increase in surface temperatures all over the globe [1]and as a consequence numbers of wild forest fires increase [2]. They have serious influence on human health and due to their optical properties and consequent impact on radiation budget, BB aerosols affect the planet climate [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16] These aerosol particles may both absorb and scatter solar radiation, play a key role both in modifying atmospheric visibility and photochemistry in the boundary layer [17,18] and they can act as cloud condensation nuclei [19,20,21]. BB particles may cause short-term cooling, but their gases cause warming, the effect, which over the extended time, is of greater magnitude than the cooling effect
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