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Modeling Emissions and Vertical Plume Transport of Crop Residue Burning Experiments in the Pacific Northwest
Citation:
Zhou, L., K. Baker, S. Napelenok, G. Pouliot, R. Elleman, S. O'Neill, S. Urbanski, AND David-C Wong. Modeling Emissions and Vertical Plume Transport of Crop Residue Burning Experiments in the Pacific Northwest. 2017 AGU Fall Meeting, New Orleans, LA, December 11 - 15, 2017.
Impact/Purpose:
Crop residue burning is a common land management practice that results in ambient emissions of a variety of primary and secondary pollutants with negative health impacts. The Pacific Northwest is a region of major agricultural burning, with cropland burning of nearly 200,000 hectares per year. Modeling tools have been used to support scientific and regulatory assessments that quantify the impact of wildland fires and cropland burning on air quality. Meteorological input fields, fire emissions, plume transport, as well as chemistry schemes are all factors contributing to the model uncertainties. This study focuses on the impacts of emission estimates and vertical plume transport on the simulation of pollutant CO and PM2.5.
Description:
A study in eastern Washington (Walla Walla) and north Idaho (Nez Perce) in August 2013 consisted of multiple burns of well characterized fuels with nearby surface and aerial measurements including trace species concentrations, plume rise height and boundary layer structure. Details of the field experiments are provided in Holder et al. (2017). CMAQv5.2 was applied with 2 km grid resolution from August 18 to 28, 2013 to match the crop residue burning field experiments. One base simulation without the emissions from experiment burns and four sensitivity simulations with the emissions were performed. The contribution from the crop residue burning experiments on simulated concentrations was estimated by the difference between the sensitivity simulation and base simulation. Table 1 listed the specific field study fire emission inputs included in each sensitivity simulation. Emission inputs in Simulation FIELDSTUDY and FLAMING are based on field study measurements while emission inputs in NEI2014 and GROUND are based on the approach used in the 2014 National Emission Inventory (NEI) (Pouliot et al. 2017). In Simulation FLAMING all emissions are part of the buoyant plume and none are distributed between the surface and plume bottom. The contribution from the field burn’s Burn 1,2,4,5 are bluegrass fields in Nez Perce; Burn 3 is wheat field in Nez Perce; Burn 6 and 8 are wheat fields in Walla Walla. Burn 7 was not sampled. Details of the model simulation set up and inputs are provided in Zhou et al. (2017).
