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Impact of wildfires on regional air pollution
Citation:
Rappold, A., A. Larsen, B. Reich, AND M. Ruminski. Impact of wildfires on regional air pollution. CMAS, Chapel Hill, NC, October 05 - 07, 2015.
Impact/Purpose:
We examine the impact of wildfires and agricultural/prescribed burning on regional air pollution and Air Quality Index (AQI) between 2006 and 2013. Our preliminary results suggest that smoke from wildfires and prescribed burns has a substantial effect on regional air quality and accounts for a large percentage of days with unhealthy AQI levels. The abstract will be presented at the Community Modeling and Analysis System (CMAS) Meeting, October 5-7, 2015, Chapel Hill, NC
Description:
We examine the impact of wildfires and agricultural/prescribed burning on regional air pollution and Air Quality Index (AQI) between 2006 and 2013. We define daily regional air pollution using monitoring sites for ozone (n=1595), PM2.5 collected by Federal Reference Method (n=1058), and constituents of PM2.5 from the Interagency Monitoring of PROtected Visual Environment (IMPROVE) network (n=264) and use satellite image analysis from the NOAA Hazard Mapping System (HMS) to determine days on which visible smoke plumes are detected in the vertical column of the monitoring site. To examine the impact of smoke from these fires on regional air pollution we use a two stage approach, accounting for within site (1st stage) and between site (2nd stage) variations. At the first stage we estimate a monitor-specific plume day effect describing the relative change in pollutant concentrations on the days impacted by smoke plume while accounting for confounding effects of season and temperature_. At the second stage we combine monitor-specific plume day effects with a Bayesian hierarchical model and estimate a pooled nationally-averaged effect. HMS visible smoke plumes were detected on 6% of ozone, 8% of PM2.5 and 6% of IMPROVE network monitoring days. Our preliminary results indicate that the long range transport of air pollutants from wildfires and prescribed burns increase ozone concentration by 11% and PM2.5 mass by 34%. On all of the days where monitoring sites were AQI code Green for ozone, 6% of those days experienced smoke plume cover. We observed 18% plume coverage on code Yellow (‘moderate’) days, 25% on code Orange (“unhealthy for sensitive groups”) days, 29% on code Red (“unhealthy”) days and 28% on code Purple (“very unhealthy”) days. Similarly, for PM2.5, we observed plume coverage on 4% of code Green days, 11% on code Yellow days, 18% on code Orange days, 17% on code Red days and 50% on code Purple days. Our preliminary results suggest that smoke from wildfires and prescribed burns has a substantial effect on regional air quality and accounts for a large percentage of days with unhealthy AQI levels.