Measuring atmospheric CO2 enhancements from the 2017 British Columbia wildfires using a lidar

Mao, Jianping, Abshire, James B., Kawa, Stephan R., Riris, Haris, Sun, Xiaoli, Andela, Niels ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8241-6143 and Kolbeck, Paul T. 2021. Measuring atmospheric CO2 enhancements from the 2017 British Columbia wildfires using a lidar. Geophysical Research Letters 48 (16) , e2021GL093805. 10.1029/2021GL093805

Preview

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

During the summer 2017 ASCENDS/ABoVE airborne science campaign, the NASA Goddard CO2 Sounder lidar overflew smoke plumes from wildfires in the British Columbia, Canada. In the flight path over Vancouver Island on 8 August 2017, the column XCO2 retrievals from the lidar measurements at flight altitudes around 9 km showed an average enhancement of 4 ppm from the wildfires. A comparison of these enhancements with those from the Goddard Global Chemistry Transport model suggested that the modeled CO2 emissions from wildfires were underestimated by more than a factor of 2. A spiral-down validation performed at Moses Lake airport, Washington showed a bias of 0.1 ppm relative to in situ measurements and a standard deviation of 1 ppm in lidar XCO2 retrievals. The results show that future airborne campaigns and spaceborne missions with this type of lidar can improve estimates of CO2 emissions from wildfires and estimates of carbon fluxes globally.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Earth and Environmental Sciences
Additional Information:	This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	0094-8276
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	29 November 2021
Date of Acceptance:	3 August 2021
Last Modified:	10 Jul 2023 16:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/145809

Citation Data

Cited 2 times in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item