Air quality impacts of the 2019–2020 Black Summer wildfires on Australian schools

Virgilio, Giovanni Di; Hart, Mary; Maharaj, Angela M.; Jiang, Ningbo

doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2021.118450

Cited by 14 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…A recent study has also demonstrated that despite the landscape-scale pollutant source, spatio-temporal patterns in pollutant concentrations have been observed in the Sydney region. This reinforces the need to use locally measured CO tracer values for calculation of exposure risk when possible (Di Virgilio et al, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 53%

“…Historically, particulate and CO pollution experienced in eastern Australia's population centres is attributable to smoke events (Duc et al, 2018;Keywood et al, 2015;Paton-Walsh et al, 2019), with air quality outside of these events normally relatively good. However, the episodic influence of smoke is becoming more frequent and more sustained air quality impacts have been observed recently (Di Virgilio et al, 2021;Ryan et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Gas and Aerosol Phase Composition of Smoke Plumes From The 2019-2020 Black Summer Bushfires and Potential Implications For Human Health

Simmons

Paton‐Walsh

Mouat

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season was historically large, long, and intense. Smoke from fires burning in southeast Australia blanketed population centres for weeks to months. This study reports the chemical composition in the gas and aerosol phase of aged plumes measured near Wollongong, NSW in early 2020. Enhancement ratios to CO are presented for thirteen species. Plume composition is largely similar to that measured in fresh smoke during previous studies. It is hoped enhancement ratios reported here will assist in plume modelling of landscape scale fires and allow concentration estimates of infrequently measured atmospheric pollutants at monitoring stations. The relative toxicological contribution of species present in the plumes was determined for dilute plume exposure at the measurement site and for concentrated plumes at a heavily impacted population centre case study location. Similar results were determined for both sites. Respirable particles, formaldehyde and acrolein were found to contribute significantly to the toxicological loading, with respirable particles contributing approximately half of the loading. This is a reminder to consider not only the toxicological contributions of particles when studying health impacts of bushfire smoke exposure.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 53%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gas and Aerosol Phase Composition of Smoke Plumes From The 2019-2020 Black Summer Bushfires and Potential Implications For Human Health

Simmons

Paton‐Walsh

Mouat

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…Australia suffered unprecedented wildfires during the summer of 2019–2020 (Hirsch & Koren, 2021) owing to record‐breaking high temperatures and months of extreme drought that were likely associated with anthropogenic climate change (Abram et al., 2021; Deb et al., 2020). In these “Black Summer” wildfires, the states of New South Wales and Victoria experienced the most damage, suffering major environmental and economic losses (Boer et al., 2020; Di Virgilio et al., 2021; Filkov et al., 2020; Graham et al., 2021; Johnston et al., 2020). The wildfires persisted for several months, emitting enormous amounts of smoke particles to the atmosphere, drawing parallels to moderate volcanic eruptions (Chang et al., 2021; Hirsch & Koren, 2021) and induced potential environmental, meteorological, and climatic effects (Ehsani et al., 2020; Fasullo et al., 2021; Kumar et al., 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Causes and Effects of the Long‐Range Dispersion of Carbonaceous Aerosols From the 2019–2020 Australian Wildfires

Niu

Chen

et al. 2022

Geophysical Research Letters

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Australia experienced record‐breaking wildfires during 2019–2020, which emitted large amounts of carbonaceous aerosols (CAs) to the atmosphere. In this study, we explored the atmospheric dynamics and thermodynamic mechanism of the long‐range transport of CAs during November 2019–February 2020. The results indicate that the emitted CAs had a ternary advective spreading pattern across the Pacific Ocean in the Southern Hemisphere (SH), influenced mainly by the westerlies and anticyclonic systems. Upward vertical motion over the convergence zone and heat released from smoke pyro‐cumulonimbus clouds and strong light absorption of CAs provided strong vertical lift as the predominant injection pathway of the CAs into the stratosphere in the central Pacific Ocean in the SH. The abundant tropospheric CAs induced atmospheric heating (and potentially surface cooling), with increasing air temperature and decreasing of surface temperature. The anomalous thermal structure led to changes in atmospheric circulation, which weakened the upward vertical motion.

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“…The recent Black Summer bushfires in Australia, for example, burnt over 24 million hectares of land [3] and killed or displaced three billion animals [20]. At the same time, the bushfires directly caused 33 deaths [3], reduced air quality to hazardous levels for humans [12], destroyed thousands of buildings and caused major disruption to critical infrastructure networks, bringing society to a standstill in affected areas [14]. Climate scientists link the severity of the 2019/20 bushfire season-the most destructive ever recorded in Australia-with climate variability and long-term climate trends, which are themselves linked to technological changes since the Industrial Revolution [1,7,29].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Would the Trees Dim the Lights? Adopting the Intentional Stance for More-Than-Human Participatory Design

Cooper

2022

Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022 - Volume 2

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The 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires in Australia demonstrated the brutal and disastrous consequences of changing the technological world without considering linkages with the biophysical, ecological or human worlds. An emerging more-than-human design philosophy encourages designers to consider such interrelations between humans and non-human entities. Yet, the design research community has focused on situated or embodied experiences for designers, rather than developing processes to legitimate the perspectives of non-human entities through participatory design. This paper explores how adopting the 'intentional stance', a concept from philosophy, might provide a heuristic for more-thanhuman participatory design. Through experimentation with the intentional stance in the context of smart lighting systems, the paper demonstrates that the approach has potential for non-human entities from the ecological world, but less so for the biophysical world. The paper concludes by encouraging critique and evolution of the intentional stance, and of other approaches, to legitimate the perspectives of non-human entities in everyday design. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Participatory design.

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Air quality impacts of the 2019–2020 Black Summer wildfires on Australian schools

Cited by 14 publications

References 62 publications

The Gas and Aerosol Phase Composition of Smoke Plumes From The 2019-2020 Black Summer Bushfires and Potential Implications For Human Health

The Gas and Aerosol Phase Composition of Smoke Plumes From The 2019-2020 Black Summer Bushfires and Potential Implications For Human Health

Causes and Effects of the Long‐Range Dispersion of Carbonaceous Aerosols From the 2019–2020 Australian Wildfires

Would the Trees Dim the Lights? Adopting the Intentional Stance for More-Than-Human Participatory Design

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