Biomass Burning Over the United States East Coast and Western North Atlantic Ocean: Implications for Clouds and Air Quality

Abstract

Wildfires, agricultural burning, and other forms of biofuel consumption represent a significant source of gaseous and particulate emissions that can be transported far distances (

Dimethylamine in cloud water: a case study over the northwest Atlantic Ocean

“…56 Biomass burning is common throughout the year, ranging from residential wood burning along the U.S. east coast, especially in winter 88 to transported smoke plumes from wildres and agricultural burning. 89 As expected, trajectories were mainly from over the U.S. east coast for the two winter categories without much discernible difference. These air masses were thus signicantly impacted by continental emissions, including those from anthropogenic sources, agricultural activity, and likely biomass burning.…”

“…56 Biomass burning is common throughout the year, ranging from residential wood burning along the U.S. east coast, especially in winter 88 to transported smoke plumes from wildfires and agricultural burning. 89…”

“…While the HSRL-2 often detected smoke during ACTIVATE flights, it was not always the case that there was clear evidence of it mixing with boundary layer clouds sampled by the Falcon. Research flight 28 was separately investigated by Mardi et al 89 who showed the mixing of smoke plumes with boundary layer clouds. That study showed enhanced aerosol extinction coefficient (532 nm) in the marine boundary layer and even higher values in the free troposphere (>2 km).…”

Relationships between supermicrometer particle concentrations and cloud water sea salt and dust concentrations: analysis of MONARC and ACTIVATE data

“…Recent ACTIVATE studies summarize instrument details relevant to this work. [48][49][50][51] This study focuses exclusively on HU-25 Falcon data during the winter and summer campaigns in 2020, which included 40 ights over the northwest Atlantic Ocean (Fig. 2).…”

Sea salt reactivity over the northwest Atlantic: an in-depth look using the airborne ACTIVATE dataset

“…Many factors dictate the extent to which Cl − depletion occurs in an air mass, including meteorology (e.g., wind speed; temperature; relative humidity, RH; and available solar radiation), the size distribution and mixing state of sea salt particles, and the availability and length of exposure to surrounding acidic species (Su et al, 2022, and references therein). Regarding the latter, Cl − depletion is therefore typically observed where marine particles and acidic species are both present, such as where emissions from biomass burning (BB) advect over a marine location (Braun et al, 2017;Maudlin et al, 2015;Li et al, 2003;Yokelson et al, 2009;Akagi et al, 2013;Dang et al, 2022;Crosbie et al, 2022); in regions with active phytoplankton and marine bacteria that emit dimethyl sulfide (DMS), which can oxidize to form sulfuric acid (H 2 SO 4 ; Seinfeld and Pandis, 2016;Tang et al, 2019;Yan et al, 2020); and/or in and around urban coastal environments (e.g., Kong et al, 2014;Chatterjee et al, 2020;AzadiAghdam et al, 2019;Nolte et al, 2008) where anthropogenic emissions serve as precursors for various acidic species.…”