Abstract
Biomass burning (BB) plays an important role in the formation of heavy pollution events during harvest seasons in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei (BTH) region by releasing trace gases and particulate matter into the atmosphere. A better understanding of spatial-temporal variations of BB in BTH is required to assess its impacts on air quality, especially on heavy haze pollution. The fourth version of the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED4)’s fire counts and carbon emissions data were used in this research, which shows the varying number of fire counts in China from 2003 to 2020 demonstrated a fluctuating but generally rising trend, with a peak in 2013. Most fire counts were concentrated in three key periods: March (11%), June–July (33%), and October (9.68%). The increase in fire counts will inevitably lead to the growth of carbon emissions. The four major vegetation types of the fires were agriculture (58.1%), followed by grassland (35.5%), and forest (4.1%), with the fewest in peat. In addition, a separate study for the year 2020 found that the fire counts and carbon emissions were different for this year, with the overall average trend in the study time. For example, the monthly peak fire counts changed from June to March. The cumulative emissions of carbon, CO, CO2, CH4, dry matter, and particulate matter from BB in BTH reached 201 Gg, 39 Gg, 670 Gg, 2 Gg, 417 Gg, and 3 Gg in 2020, respectively.
Highlights
Biomass burning (BB), such as wildfire, agricultural open-burning, residential biofuel burning, forest fire, grass burning, and peatland fire [1], is an important source of atmospheric particulate matter and trace gases [2–5]
The quantitative study by Shi and coworkers [14] on aerosol emitted from open biomass burning in the Northeast China (NEC) region based on the POLDER/PARASOL satellite aerosol dataset found a 16% decline in 565 nm AOD during the 72 h BB transport process
Based on the BB fire counts and carbon emissions data collected by GFED4 in the BTH region from 2003 to 2020, this study considered multiple time and regional scales to investigate the trends and effects of BB fire counts and carbon emissions in the BTH region
Summary
Biomass burning (BB), such as wildfire, agricultural open-burning, residential biofuel burning, forest fire, grass burning, and peatland fire [1], is an important source of atmospheric particulate matter and trace gases [2–5]. It has an important impact on regional and even global air quality, the chemical composition of particulate matter, climate system, and human health [6,7]. Wang and coworkers [13] found most fire counts concentrated in March–April (37%) and October–November (46%) in Northeast China (NEC) Their result showed the largest proportion of all fires were in cropland (90.8%), followed by forest (5.3%) and grassland (3.1%). Taking CO2 as an example, crop residue burning was observed to be the largest contributor of CO2 overall, accounting for 68% of total CO2 emissions, followed by forest (30%) and grassland (2%) fires
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