A joint research group from Yokohama City University Graduate School, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) found that the types and amounts of volatile organic compounds emitted from wildfires in western North America are more important than the types of plants burned. It was found that the influence of combustion temperature is large.
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by forest fires are said to have a significant impact on local environmental pollution and climate change. The construction of predictive models for atmospheric chemistry has become an important issue in recent years in atmospheric chemistry.
In NOAA and NASA's large-scale research project FIREX-AQ, which started in 2016, the research group found that the instantaneous amount of VOC generation can be evaluated with high accuracy by combining two VOC profiles (high-temperature or low-temperature pyrolysis profiles). It was shown that burning does not depend on the type of plant.
To confirm whether the results obtained in the laboratory can be applied to actual wildfires in the field, airborne observations using the NASA DC-2019 were conducted in western North America in the summer of 8. As a result of similarly measuring and analyzing VOCs from eight different wildfires, they found that the combination of high-temperature and low-temperature pyrolysis profiles can express the type and amount of wildfire-derived VOCs with more than 8% accuracy.
Furthermore, the relative contributions of the high and low temperature pyrolysis profiles were correlated with the satellite-observed fire radiative power.This led to the conclusion that combustion temperature has a greater effect than the type of plant being burned.
These results make it possible to estimate the amount of VOC generated solely by observing the combustion radiation force.The research group is proposing a new framework for estimating the amount of VOCs emitted from wildfires based on combustion temperature information obtained from satellite observations.
Paper information:【Environmental Science & Technology】Fuel-Type Independent Parameterization of Volatile Organic Compound Emissions from Western US Wildfire
