Where there’s fire, there’s smoke: impacts of fires on air quality in the eastern United States
Fires are widespread and frequent across the eastern United States, as they are used extensively for wildfire mitigation, ecosystem management, and disposing of biomass debris from agriculture and land clearing. Historically, the extent of these fires has been underestimated due to the lack of comprehensive burn records and the difficulty of detecting small, short-duration fires from satellites. Our analysis of government records finds that prescribed fire policy in Florida is successfully interrupting the natural moisture controls on fire, reducing wildfire risks for the state. We use improved fire detections from a geostationary satellite instrument (Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on GOES) and a new compilation of locally specific emission factors to develop a new biomass burning inventory for the eastern U.S. We use this emission inventory in an atmospheric chemistry model to simulate air quality across the U.S. and evaluate the model with aerosol measurements from the surface, satellites, and aircraft. The new inventory fits these observations as well or better than multiple other emission inventories and suggests that fire emissions are likely at the upper end of the wide range of previous estimates. We quantify the impacts on air quality in the eastern U.S. and discuss the implications for health and prescribed fire management.
Christopher Holmes
Associate Professor
Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Science
Florida State University
Dr. Holmes’s research examines the global cycles of air pollutants and greenhouse gases, and the interactions of both with climate change. His group builds and uses numerical models to understand chemical and physical processes that control the fate and impact of contaminants in the environment. These models are evaluated and improved using observations from surface monitoring networks, aircraft, and ships, as well as remote sensing from satellites and radar. Current research topics in his group include ozone interactions with the biosphere, air quality and climate impacts of biomass burning, multiscale modeling of atmospheric oxidants, changing Arctic chemistry, and biogeochemical cycling of mercury. Dr. Holmes is an NSF CAREER awardee and a NASA New Investigator. He earned a Ph.D. in Earth and Planetary Science from Harvard University (2010) and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Irvine until joining Florida State University in 2014.