Around the world in 17 days - hemispheric-scale transport of forest fire smoke from Russia in May 2003

Abstract

Abstract. In May 2003, severe forest fires in southeast Russia resulted in smoke plumes extending widely across the Northern Hemisphere. This study combines satellite data from a variety of platforms (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS), Earth Probe Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) and Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME)) and vertical aerosol profiles derived with Raman lidar measurements with results from a Lagrangian particle dispersion model to understand the transport processes that led to the large haze plumes observed over North America and Europe. The satellite images provided a unique opportunity for validating model simulations of tropospheric transport on a truly hemispheric scale. Transport of the smoke occurred in two directions: Smoke travelling northwestwards towards Scandinavia was lifted over the Urals and arrived over the Norwegian Sea. Smoke travelling eastwards to the Okhotsk Sea was also lifted, it then crossed the Bering Sea to Alaska from where it proceeded to Canada and was later even observed over Scandinavia and Eastern Europe on its way back to Russia. Not many events of this kind, if any, have been observed, documented and simulated with a transport model comprehensively. The total transport time was about 17 days. We compared transport model simulations using meteorological analysis data from both the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) and the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) in order to find out how well this event could be simulated using these two datasets. Although differences between the two simulations are found on small scales, both agree remarkably well with each other and with the observations on large scales. On the basis of the available observations, it cannot be decided which simulation was more realistic.

Springtime Arctic aerosol: Smoke versus haze, a case study for March 2008

“…Damoah et al (2004) found good agreement between these both data sets for 17 days for trajectories along the Arctic circumference. For the data presented here a connection between the Khabarovsk or biomass burning event and the observations on NP-35 on March 17 seems to be clear.…”

Global dimming and brightening versus atmospheric column transparency, Europe, 1906–2007

“…One such example was detected at Tõravere by observations of two instruments, actinometer and the AERONET photometer, on 28 May 2003. However, this kind of global-scale transport of forest fire smoke is rather exceptional [Damoah et al, 2004].…”

An update on polar aerosol optical properties using POLAR-AOD and other measurements performed during the International Polar Year

“…Subsequently, only the data relative to the four summer months from June to September were considered when calculating the long-term variations of AOD, with the background contribution hereafter referred to as BG, and enhancements attributed to extinction mainly by smoke particles from boreal forest fires (hereafter referred to as FFS) in North America and Siberia (Forster et al, 2001;Damoah et al, 2004;Stohl et al, 2006;Tunved et al, 2006). Following the same approach used by Tomasi et al (2007), this summer-time analysis ignores influences of AH and/or Asian dust (AD) that occur mainly during late winter and spring (Rahn et al, 1977;Shaw, 1982Shaw, , 1983VanCuren and Cahill, 2002;Stone et al, 2007;Quinn et al, 2007).…”