Air Resources Laboratory 1

Inclusion of forest fires in North and Central America as extra-CONUS-domain intermittent

sources for NAQFC: an operational viability study

Pius Lee1*, Hyuncheol Kim2, Daniel Tong2, Yunhee Kim2, Tianfeng Chai2, Yunsoo Choi2, Li Pan2, Rick Saylor1, Ariel Stein2,

Youhua Tang3, Jianping Huang3, Jeff McQueen4, Marina Tsidulko3, Hochun Huang3, Sarah Lu3,

and Ivanka Stajner5

*Corresponding Author Address: Pius Lee, 1 NOAA/OAR/ARL, 1315 East West Hwy, Room 3461, Silver Spring, MD 20910.

2Earth Resources & Technology ,Inc, Annapolis Junction, MD3 I.M. Systems Group, Inc. Rockville, MD 20852.

4NOAA/NWS/National Centers for Environmental Prediction, Camp Springs, MD.5 Office of Science and Technology, National Weather Service, Silver Spring, MD.

Air Resources Laboratory 2

Deep Water Horizon offshore oil platform accident:

April 20, 2010 for 87 days

~1 mile below sea level, ~ 40 miles off Louisiana coast

(near the coast of Chandeleur Sounds)

burning of skimmed oil, flaring of the fuels directly from well pipe,

and evaporative emissions from oil slick

Share air quality modeling effort

Entire oil spill event to study impact on regional air quality over SE US

Study distribution and fate of oil spill related air pollutants

subject to uncertainties in emission inputs

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NOAA NOS OR&R (National Ocean Service / Office of Response and Restoration) oil slick trajectory model results, initialized with satellite data

Near Shore map Off Shore map

SHAPE files availableCourtesy Nesdis/NOAA

May 17, 20C10

Estimating evaporative emissions from oil slick

Near shore Off shore

Sheen in imagery may corresponds to tar balls

Air Resources Laboratory4

Equivalent area of half circle radius (April 22- June 30, 2010)

slic

k ar

eas

Approach:Estimated fresh oil amount in the

slicks for different slick typesApproximate evaporation ratios: 90:

9: 1Distributed 25% of 4.9M bbl over

daily

heavy, medium, light

Daily Change of DWH oil slick size estimated from the oil slick map

Hea

vyL

ight

Med

ium

Burn volume (barrels)Burn Counts at each 12x12 km cell

Numbers are gridded into the NAQFC 12km CONUS domain

Oil burn locations used for air quality modeling

Minimal impact on surface concentration and surface fluxes between June 1 – July 8, 2010.

June 21, 2011

Experimental NAQFCinclines toward high bias for [O3]in warm/humid SE, DWH impact minimal.

Experimental NAQFCinclines toward low bias for [pm2.5]in summer

June 2 2011

June 12 2011

June 21 2011

June 30 2011

June 2 2011

June 12 2011

June 21 2011

June 30 2011

Intra- and Exo-domainwild fire intermittentsource is rather frequent

*Wednesday Talk: Fernando Garcia-Menendez

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HMS wildfire detections during Apr. 2010

Emission should include Exo- and intra-domain wild fires

~21x

~12x

5xAgricultural burningprevails in the monthsof March and Aprilin Mexico

&&Poster: Youhua TangPoster: Youhua Tang$$ Tuesday talk: Fernando Garcia-Menedez Tuesday talk: Fernando Garcia-Menedez*Poster: Hyuncheol Kim et el. “Evaluation of fire modeling systems: fire smoke extension and chemical composition”*Poster: Hyuncheol Kim et el. “Evaluation of fire modeling systems: fire smoke extension and chemical composition”

Several operationally feasible approaches to include Exo-domain Wild Fires

Configuration Emission meteorology Species treatment

LBC size mapping

Challenges

LBC include GOCART smoke plume

QFED or GBBEP emission

GFS- GOCART&

Inline/offline

BC, OCParticle aging.

Mainly sub- micro particulates

Plume-rise (FRP) & zero-out emission within 5x

LBC include Hysplit-smoke

Hms-Bluesky*

NAM-Hysplit CO & pm25

Plume-rise$ (Briggs Eq)

Transition through a CMAQ parent domain

Can come from either method above

All relevant CMAQ species

Again satisfying all modal size distributions

More step, more complex as there is one more “intermediate” model-run

GBBEP

QFED

QFED and GBBEP produced similar spatial patterns and monthly variation in total carbon (black + organic carbons) emissions. During the simulated period, both the South America and the Africa had frequent fire activities.

In general, QFED has smaller area of detected fires but with stronger carbon emissions while GBBEP has larger area of detected fires with weaker carbon emissions.

There is a limited spatial coverage for geostationary satellites at high latitudes. Thus, QFED detected more fires in the Russia, the Siberia, and the Canadian Boreal forest.

Hou

rly f

lux

at 1

o x1o

http://ready.arl.noaa.govhttp://airquality.weather.gov/

~21x

5x

NC and GA firesimpacted Discover-AQ area.

Analysis day 20110720

NCEP operation slot

Poster: Chris Misenis; $$Tuesday Talk: Karsten BaumannTuesday Talk: Karsten Baumann

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W E EWS SNN

Southern Eastern Northern Western

10 m Windspeed

~12x

5x

Lowest mid-layer Temperature

~12x

Wrf-nmm

Wrf-Post & AqmPrdgen

PREMAQ

CMAQ

GRiB products & graphics

Verification

ICON

BCON

SMOKE

MOBILE6

Dynamic LBC fed byGOCART or HYSPLIT

Sample of hourly outputfrom premaq w.r.t parentdomain – can be much coarser in temporal and spatial resolution

Time series of monthly mean event-count HMS/smoke fraction inside CONUS domain. Blue lines indicates bottom half of domain, and red color indicates upper half of the CONUS domain

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Hms/Bluesky/Smoke monthly mean fraction owing to Wild fires in Southern Half or Northern half

0.0

0.

1

0.2

0.

3 0

.4

0.5

Intra-domain wild fire emissions

Flight track: July 20, 2011

Spirals over Wilmington and Edgewood

A long hotAnd muggyWorking day

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NASA P-3B Flight Pathes July 1-29, 2011http://www-air.larc.nasa.gov/missions/discover-aq/images/DISCOVER-AQ_2011_ALL_P3B_July1-July29.png

RTMANAM predicted 10m wind

Rain gauge analysisNAM precip

Max Temp

RTMANAM predicted 10m wind

RTMANAM predicted 2m temp

15Z

18Z

18Z

Less spurious

Sharp convergence zone

19

Comparison of Wind along flight track of P3B on July 20 2011

Spirals over Wilmington and Edgewood

Model under-predicted wind shear

More frequent lowBias in higher altitudes

Less turbulence may not matter as PBL well-mixed, shallow-convection may matter.

Air Resources Laboratory

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Comparison of Wind along flight track of P3B on July 20 2011

CMAQ471 vs obs. [NO2] on July 20, 2011

CMAQ471 vs obs. [NOy] on July 20, 2011 Models high-bias, lack of venting due tofair weather cumulus may exacerbate high-bias

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Comparison of Wind along flight track of P3B on July 20 2011 NO2 and TOL both are indicators of vehicular exhaust tracks well; ground-hugging

Air Resources Laboratory 22

Comparison of Wind along flight track of P3B on July 20 2011

CMAQ471 vs obs. [NO2] on July 20, 2011

CMAQ471 vs obs. [NOy] on July 20, 2011

For

mal

dehy

de a

s pr

oxy

of V

OC

em

issi

on

CMAQ471 no_hms_fire AOD

MODIS AOD

Spatial distribution of hourly avg. column-integrated AOD

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Satellite data was also attempted

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Summary

Last year’s study on DWH affirms that intra- and extra-domainwild fire emissions are dominant intermittent sources essential forAir Quality (AQ) studies – regional as well as continental

Several model configurations to include extra-domain wild fire emissionthrough ingesting smoke-plume from these fires in the forecast model’stime-varying chemical Lateral Boundary Conditions (LBC); i.e.chemical field fed by: (1) GFS-GOCARD-smoke; (2) HYSPLIT-smoke;and (3) Either use (1) or (2) but through the in-nesting of a large parentCMAQ domain more than 2 times the geographical area as continental U.S.

These model configurations are at various degree of development.They all have pros and cons in terms of operational feasibility for real time AQ forecasting.

Rich data set obtained from the Discover-AQ campaigns and satellite-basedAOD retrievals are extremely variable in evaluating the approaches considered.

Backup slides