Vegetation fires, absorbing aerosols and smoke plume characteristics in diverse biomass burning regions of Asia

Abstract

In this study, we explored the relationships between the satellite-retrieved fire counts (FC), fire radiative power (FRP) and aerosol indices using multi-satellite datasets at a daily time-step covering ten different biomass burning regions in Asia. We first assessed the variations in MODIS-retrieved aerosol optical depths (AOD's) in agriculture, forests, plantation and peat land burning regions and then used MODIS FC and FRP (hereafter FC/FRP) to explain the variations in AOD characteristics. Results suggest that tropical broadleaf forests in Laos burn more intensively than the other vegetation fires. FC/FRP-AOD correlations in different agricultural residue burning regions did not exceed 20% whereas in forest regions they reached 40%. To specifically account for absorbing aerosols, we used Ozone Monitoring Instrument-derived aerosol absorption optical depth (AAOD) and UV aerosol index (UVAI). Results suggest relatively high AAOD and UVAI values in forest fires compared with peat and agriculture fires. Further, FC/FRP could explain a maximum of 29% and 53% of AAOD variations, whereas FC/FRP could explain at most 33% and 51% of the variation in agricultural and forest biomass burning regions, respectively. Relatively, UVAI was found to be a better indicator than AOD and AAOD in both agriculture and forest biomass burning plumes. Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations data showed vertically elevated aerosol profiles greater than 3.2-5.3 km altitude in the forest fire plumes compared to 2.2-3.9 km and less than 1 km in agriculture and peat-land fires, respectively. We infer the need to assimilate smoke plume height information for effective characterization of pollutants from different sources.

Satellite‐Observed Impacts of Wildfires on Regional Atmosphere Composition and the Shortwave Radiative Forcing: A Multiple Case Study

“…As Schreier et al () demonstrated, woody savanna and cropland fires have a relatively higher NO x Ce than forest fires, and this could result from woody savanna and cropland biomes having higher N content than forests, providing more N content to be oxidized into NO x . Meanwhile, for smoke aerosols, Vadrevu et al () pointed out that forest fires emitted more absorptive aerosols than cropland. Differences among fires in the current work showed good consistencies with their descriptions.…”

Biomass burning smoke heights over the Amazon observed from space

“…Their definition is comparable to our CALIOP median plume height, which produced a value of 2.3±0.7 km for the September months. Other CALIOP smoke plume heights have been reported over eastern Europe (1.7-6 km) and several regions and biomes across Asia (0.8-5.3 km) (Amiridis et al, 2010;Labonne et al, 2007;Tosca et al, 2011;Vadrevu et al, 2015).…”

Determination of enhancement ratios of HCOOH relative to CO in biomass burning plumes by the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI)

“…9 in Schreier et al (2014) and Fig. 13 in van der Werf et al (2010), the soil for IND is supposed to be mainly composed of cropland (agriculture), which is associated with an EF CO of 102 ± 33 g kg −1 , and probably also by extratropical forest, which is characterized by an EF CO equal to 122 ± 44 g kg −1 , and savanna, with an EF CO of 63 ± 17 g kg −1 . The fuel type for SEA is supposed to be a mix of extratropical forest and savanna, with an EF CO of 122 ± 44 and 63 ± 17 g kg −1 , respectively.…”

“…This is strongly possible as agricultural residue burning is prevalent in these regions (e.g., Kaskaoutis et al, 2014;Vadrevu et al, 2015). Over India and over Southeast Asia, our ER (HCOOH/CO) values (6.8 × 10 −3 ± 0.44 × 10 −3 mol mol −1 for India and 5.8 × 10 −3 ± 0.15 × 10 −3 mol mol −1 for Southeast Asia) are close to the value referenced by Akagi et al (2011) for cropland fires (6 × 10 −3 mol mol −1 ).…”