Black carbon lofts wildfire smoke high into the stratosphere to form a persistent plume
Up in smoke
Extensive and intense wildfires in the Pacific Northwest of the United States in 2017 injected large quantities of smoke into the stratosphere. Yu et al. used satellite observations and modeling to characterize the history and chemistry of that smoke. The smoke rose to altitudes between 12 and 23 kilometers within 2 months owing to solar heating of black carbon. The smoke then remained in the stratosphere for more than 8 months. Photochemical loss of organic carbon resulted in a smoke lifetime 40% shorter than expected.
Science, this issue p. 587
Abstract
In 2017, western Canadian wildfires injected smoke into the stratosphere that was detectable by satellites for more than 8 months. The smoke plume rose from 12 to 23 kilometers within 2 months owing to solar heating of black carbon, extending the lifetime and latitudinal spread. Comparisons of model simulations to the rate of observed lofting indicate that 2% of the smoke mass was black carbon. The observed smoke lifetime in the stratosphere was 40% shorter than calculated with a standard model that does not consider photochemical loss of organic carbon. Photochemistry is represented by using an empirical ozone-organics reaction probability that matches the observed smoke decay. The observed rapid plume rise, latitudinal spread, and photochemical reactions provide new insights into potential global climate impacts from nuclear war.
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Supplementary Material
Summary
Materials and Methods
Supplementary Text
Figs. S1 to S12
Table S1
Resources
File (aax1748_yu_sm.pdf)
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Science
Volume 365 | Issue 6453
9 August 2019
9 August 2019
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
Submission history
Received: 27 February 2019
Accepted: 12 July 2019
Published in print: 9 August 2019
Acknowledgments
We thank J. Burkholder, D. W. Fahey, G. Mann, L. Liu, M. I. Mishchenko, G. Schill, J. Schwarz, and P. Campuzano-Jost for helpful discussions. The CESM project is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Science (BER) of the U.S. Department of Energy. We acknowledge high-performance computing support from Cheyenne (doi:10.5065/D6RX99HX) provided by NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. This work used the RMACC Summit supercomputer, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (awards ACI-1532235 and ACI-1532236), the University of Colorado Boulder, and Colorado State University. Funding: P.Y., R.W.P, K.H.R, S.M.D., and R.-S.G. are supported by NOAA ESRL CSD; O.B.T., A.R., C.G.B., and Y.Z. are supported by the Open Philanthropy Project; T.D.T. is supported by the NASA Upper Atmosphere Research Program, NOAA UAS Program and NOAA ESRL CSD; and D.A.P. is supported by the NASA New Investigator Program. Author contributions: P.Y., O.B.T., R.W.P., R.-S.G., and K.H.R. wrote the manuscript. P.Y., O.B.T., C.G.B., and A.R. designed the model experiments. P.Y. performed model simulations and analysis on SAGE III-ISS. P.Y. and Y.Z. analyzed the CALIOP data. C.G.B., O.B.T., P.Y, and E.T.W. performed the optical properties calculations. M.D.F. and D.A.P. provided meteorological details and initial analysis on the pyroCb smoke. T.D.T. and R.-S.G. provided the POPS measurements. P.Y. and S.M.D. performed analysis on MLS data. J.d.G. provided insights on ozone reaction and smoke morphology. All authors edited the manuscripts. Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Data and materials availability: SAGE III-ISS data are available at https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/project/sageiii-iss/sageiii-iss_table; CALIOP data are available at https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/project/calipso/calipso_table; POPS data, model simulations and MSTM code are available at https://osf.io/efqd5/?view_only=09dca4c0903446fb831344bc4c87081a; MLS data are available at https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov.
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