“…These fires can be intense enough to create pyro-convective lofting and inject smoke at high altitudes (Fromm et al, 2006;Dirksen et al, 2009;Guan et al, 2010) and are expected to become more frequent under a 15 changing climate (Bradstock et al, 2009;Cai et al, 2009;Keywood et al, 2013;King et al, 2013). There has been growing interest in characterising the composition of smoke from Australian temperate forest fires in recent years, mostly arising from increased awareness of the significant impacts of bushfire smoke on regional air quality (Reisen et al, 2011(Reisen et al, , 2013Price et al, 2012;Keywood et al, 2015;Rea et al, 2016) and its associated repercussions on human health (Reisen and Brown, 2006;Johnston et al, 2012Johnston et al, , 2014Reisen et al, 2015;Reid et al, 2016), coincident with a mandate for state agencies to increase 20 prescribed burning in the wake of the catastrophic 2009 forest fires in Victoria (Teague et al, 2010). Prescribed burning is widely used in Australia as a means of reducing bushfire risk (Boer et al, 2009); however, these low to moderate intensity fires often take place close to population centres, under weather conditions that are conducive to pollution build up, sometimes on a regional scale (e.g., Williamson et al, 2016, Fig.…”