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 Lee 1*, Hyuncheol Kim 2, Daniel Tong 2, Yunhee Kim 2, Tianfeng Chai 2, Yunsoo Choi 2, Li Pan 2, Rick Saylor 1, Ariel Stein 2, Youhua Tang 3, Jianping Huang 3, Jeff McQueen 4, Marina Tsidulko 3, Hochun Huang 3, Sarah Lu 3, and Ivanka Stajner 5 *Corresponding Author Address: Pius Lee, 1 NOAA/OAR/ARL, 1315 East West Hwy, Room 3461, Silver Spring, MD Earth Resources & Technology,Inc, Annapolis Junction, MD 3 I.M. Systems Group, Inc. Rockville, MD NOAA/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

Air Resources Laboratory 3 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 available Courtesy Nesdis/NOAA May 17, 20C10 Estimating evaporative emissions from oil slick Near shoreOff shore Sheen in imagery may corresponds to tar balls

Air Resources Laboratory 4 Equivalent area of half circle radius (April 22- June 30, 2010) slick areas Approach: Estimated fresh oil amount in the slicks for different slick types Approximate evaporation ratios: 90: 9: 1 Distributed 25% of 4.9M bbl over daily heavy, medium, light Daily Change of DWH oil slick size estimated from the oil slick map Heavy Light Medium

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, June 21, 2011 Experimental NAQFC inclines toward high bias for [O 3 ] in warm/humid SE, DWH impact minimal. Experimental NAQFC inclines toward low bias for [pm 2.5 ] in summer

June June June June

June June June June Intra- and Exo-domain wild fire intermittent source is rather frequent *Wednesday Talk: Fernando Garcia-Menendez

Air Resources Laboratory 9 HMS wildfire detections during Apr Emission should include Exo- and intra-domain wild fires ~21x ~12x 5x Agricultural burning prevails in the months of March and April in Mexico

& Poster: Youhua Tang $ Tuesday talk: Fernando Garcia-Menedez *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 ConfigurationEmissionmeteorology Species treatment LBC size mapping Challenges LBC include GOCART smoke plume QFED or GBBEP emission GFS- GOCART & Inline/offline BC, OC Particle 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

Total Carbon Emissions for GBBEP & QFED (JUL-SEP 2010) 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. Hourly flux at 1 o x1 o

~21x 5x NC and GA fires impacted Discover-AQ area. Analysis day NCEP operation slot $ Tuesday Talk: Karsten Baumann Poster: Chris Misenis; $ Tuesday Talk: Karsten Baumann

Air Resources Laboratory 13 WEEWSSNN SouthernEasternNorthernWestern

10 m Windspeed ~12x 5x Lowest mid-layer Temperature ~12x Dynamic LBC fed by GOCART or HYSPLIT Sample of hourly output from premaq w.r.t parent domain – 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 Hms/Bluesky/Smoke monthly mean fraction owing to Wild fires in Southern Half or Northern half Intra-domain wild fire emissions

Flight track: July 20, 2011 Spirals over Wilmington and Edgewood A long hot And muggy Working day

Air Resources Laboratory 17 NASA P-3B Flight Pathes July 1-29, aq/images/DISCOVER-AQ_2011_ALL_P3B_July1-July29.png aq/images/DISCOVER-AQ_2011_ALL_P3B_July1-July29.png

RTMA NAM predicted 10m wind Rain gauge analysis NAM precip Max Temp RTMA NAM predicted 10m wind RTMA NAM predicted 2m temp 15Z 18Z Less spurious Sharp convergence zone

19 Comparison of Wind along flight track of P3B on July Spirals over Wilmington and Edgewood Model under-predicted wind shear More frequent low Bias in higher altitudes Less turbulence may not matter as PBL well- mixed, shallow-convection may matter. Air Resources Laboratory

20 Comparison of Wind along flight track of P3B on July CMAQ471 vs obs. [NO 2 ] on July 20, 2011 CMAQ471 vs obs. [NO y ] on July 20, 2011 Models high-bias, lack of venting due to fair weather cumulus may exacerbate high-bias

Air Resources Laboratory 21 Comparison of Wind along flight track of P3B on July 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 CMAQ471 vs obs. [NO 2 ] on July 20, 2011 CMAQ471 vs obs. [NO y ] on July 20, 2011 Formaldehyde as proxy of VOC emission

CMAQ471 no_hms_fire AOD MODIS AOD Spatial distribution of hourly avg. column-integrated AOD Air Resources Laboratory 23 Satellite data was also attempted

Air Resources Laboratory 24 Summary  Last year’s study on DWH affirms that intra- and extra-domain wild fire emissions are dominant intermittent sources essential for Air Quality (AQ) studies – regional as well as continental  Several model configurations to include extra-domain wild fire emission through ingesting smoke-plume from these fires in the forecast model’s time-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 parent CMAQ 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-based AOD retrievals are extremely variable in evaluating the approaches considered.

Backup slides