Fire Influences on Atmospheric Composition, Air Quality and Climate

Abstract

Fires impact atmospheric composition through their emissions, which range from long-lived gases to shortlived gases and aerosols. Effects are typically larger in the tropics and boreal regions but can also be substantial in highly populated areas in the northern mid-latitudes. In all regions, fire can impact air quality and health. Similarly, its effect on large-scale atmospheric processes, including regional and global atmospheric chemistry and climate forcing, can be substantial, but this remains largely unexplored. The impacts are primarily realised in the boundary layer and lower free troposphere but can also be noticeable in upper troposphere/lower stratosphere (UT/LS) region, for the most intense fires. In this review, we summarise the recent literature on findings related to fire impact on atmospheric composition, air quality and climate. We explore both observational and modelling approaches and present information on key regions and on the globe as a whole. We also discuss the current and future directions in this area of research, focusing on the major advances in emission estimates, the emerging efforts to include fire as a component in Earth system modelling and the use of modelling to assess health impacts of fire emissions.

Simulating the Black Saturday 2009 smoke plume with an interactive composition‐climate model: Sensitivity to emissions amount, timing, and injection height

“…We used what, to the best of our knowledge, was the most detailed fire information available in our estimates of emissions amount, examining the possible contribution of single large fires on Black Saturday and possibly higher emissions factors to CO concentrations 3 weeks after the fire. This approach for individual fires complements emissions studies at annual and interannual scales to understand the effects on modeled composition of biases in satellite‐based emissions estimates [ Ichoku et al ., ; Voulgarakis and Field , ]. In our case, higher bottom‐up emissions tended to improve agreement with the Aura CO.…”

The status and challenge of global fire modelling

“…Fire emissions are also an important driver of inter-annual variability in the atmospheric growth rate of CO 2 (van der Werf et al, 2004(van der Werf et al, , 2010Prentice et al, 2011;Guerlet et al, 2013) and a significant contribution to the atmospheric budgets of CH 4 , CO, N 2 O and many other atmospheric constituents. As a source of aerosol (including black carbon) and ozone precursors (Voulgarakis and Field, 2015), emissions from fires contribute directly and indirectly to radiative forcing (Myhre et al, 2013;Ward et al, 2012), reducing net shortwave radiation at the surface and warming the lower atmosphere, thus affecting regional temperature, clouds, and precipitation (Tosca et al, 2010(Tosca et al, , 2014Ten Hoeve et al, 2012;Boucher et al, 2014) and regional-to largescale atmospheric circulation patterns (Tosca et al, 2013;Zhang et al, 2009). Through their impacts on ozone, and as a source of CO and volatile organic compounds, fires also affect the atmospheric abundance of the OH radical, which determines the atmospheric lifetime of the greenhouse gas methane (Bousquet et al, 2006).…”

Evaluation of biomass burning aerosols in the HadGEM3 climate model with observations from the SAMBBA field campaign

“…Carbonaceous aerosols are produced from open burning of vegetation, including both wildfires and managed fires for clearing forest, pasture, and arable land. These aerosols have a wide range of impacts (Voulgarakis and Field, 2015), including short-term influences on local and regional weather (e.g. Kolusu et al, 2015) and significant impacts on regional air quality and human health (Johnston et al, 2012;Reddington et al, 2015).…”