Fires, Air Quality

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Fires, Air Quality Climate Change

• Douglas G. Fox
• fox_at_cira.colostate.edu

2
Overview

• Fire Air quality.
• Regulatory issues (primary secondary sources)
• NAAQ
• PM (2.5 2.5-10)
• Ozone
• Regional Haze Smoke Management Programs
• Climate change issues
• Emissions
• Direst indirect Radiation influences
• Land cover interactions
• An Integrated Modeling Approach
• Climate Change, Biomass, Fires and Air Quality
• Shankar, et. al. Carolina Environmental Programs

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EPA proposes to revise the level of the 24-hour
PM2.5 standard to 35 micrograms per cubic meter
(µg/m3) and to retain the level of the annual
PM2.5 standard at 15 µg/m3,
EPA proposes to revise the 24-hour PM10 standard
in part by establishing a new indicator for
thoracic coarse particles (particles generally
between 2.5 and 10 µm in diameter, PM10-2.5),
qualified so as to include any ambient mix of
PM10-2.5 that is dominated by resuspended dust
from high-density traffic on paved roads and PM
generated by industrial sources and construction
sources, and excludes any ambient mix of PM10-2.5
that is dominated by rural windblown dust and
soils and PM generated by agricultural and mining
sources. The EPA proposes to set the new PM10-2.5
standard at a level of 70 µg/m3, Emphasis added
EPA proposes to revoke, .., the current 24-hour
PM10 standard in all areas of the country except
in areas where there is at least one monitor
located in an urbanized area ... that violates
the current 24-hour PM10 standard.
http//www.epa.gov/ttn/naaqs/standards/pm/s_pm_cr_
fr.html
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PM 2.5 monthly IMPROVE STN
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PM2.5 Annual IMPROVE STN data
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Byuns CMAQ presentation
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RPO 2002 Wildfire emissions estimate
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Apportioning Fires contribution to organic
aerosol (mg/m3)

• Current OC from IMPROVE
• West 1.0 East 1.7
• Fire Apportionment OC Results
• OC/EC edge analysis
• West 0.6 East 0.9
• TrMB Regression
• West 0.3 East 0.4
• RHR regulationsnatural background
• West 0.3 East 1.0

OCM 1.4OC, avg. organic 70C
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Fire Climate Air Quality
Air Quality Climate influences
Health Particulates
NAAQS SOA
Visibility
Radiation balance

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Climate Change, Biomass, Forest Fires and Air
Quality an Integrated Modeling Approach

• Uma Shankar1, Aijun Xiu1,
• Douglas Fox2 Steven McNulty3
• 1 Carolina Environmental Program, UNC-Chapel Hill
• 2 Private Consultant, Ft. Collins, CO
• 3 USDA Forest Service Southern Global Change
  Program (SGCP)
• EAMC Science Meeting
• East Lansing, MI
• June 21, 2006

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Acknowledgments

• Work funded by EPA Star Grant RD 83227701-0
• Team members
• Craig Mattocks PnET model and database
  implementation, linkages to BEIS3
• Andy Holland BlueSky-EM and Database
  implementation, PnET linkage, SMOKE runs
• Frank Binkowski Radiative transfer model
  development, testing and analysis
• Adel Hanna Analysis of climate impacts
• Jennifer Moore Myers (SGCP) PnET model
  consultation

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Motivation
CO

• Wild fire impacts are seen at regional and global
  scales
• BC aerosol exerts strong positive forcing on
  climate but reactive gases from biomass burning
  contribute to negative forcing through secondary
  aerosol formation
• Toxics, dioxins, GHGs associated with fire
  plumes (FS 2005 Simmonds et al., AE 39, 2005)
• Short-term climate variability affects forest
  growth, fuel availability and fire all altering
  biogenic and direct fire emissions.

O3
Carbonaceous PM
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Modeling Issues

• Most climate models do not simulate any feedback
  of short-term climate variability to forest
  growth
• Most AQ models do not include feedback to
  dynamics of scattering and absorbing aerosols or
  ozone
• Model enhancements needed to better assess the
  impact of fire management (wildfire, wildland
  fire use Rx fire) on future landscapes land
  management.

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Project Objectives

• To examine the impacts of climate variability on
  vegetative cover and fuel characteristics, their
  impact on fire emissions, and feedbacks to
  biomass load and biogenic emissions
• To investigate the changes in air quality due to
  evolution of emissions in response to fires in
  successive years under various fire scenarios
• To study the feedbacks of these air quality
  changes to climate variability
• In the process, to build a modeling system that
  can be further refined for such applications.

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System Overview

• Four main components
• Photosynthetic Evapotranspiration Model (PnET)
• BlueSky-EM (FCCS) Emissions Model
• Sparse Matrix Operator Kernel Emissions Modeling
  System (SMOKE)
• Coupled meteorology-chemistry model (METCHEM).

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Modeling System Yr 1 Task Areas
2
1
PnET
Monthly met.
CCSM
Initial boundary met.
Base future year fuel data
Fire Simulator
3
Fire activity data
Hourly met
METCHEM (MM5-MCPL / MAQSIP)
Fire emissions /BlueSky
Modified biogenic land use data
5
4
Anthropogenic inventoried emissions
SMOKE
Gridded Speciated Emissions
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PnET Model Features

• Highly customized version currently used by SGCP
  
• predicts forest productivity, hydrology, carbon
  storage for a range of climate and site
  conditions
• Uses soil moisture monthly means for 4 climate
  parameters (max and min air temp, precip, solar
  radiation) and forest-specific attribute
  coefficients
• Linked to a regional GIS for vegetative cover and
  timber species data.
• Can input disturbance influences N deposition,
  changes in O3, CO2, insects, wildfires, climate
  change.
• Various versions extensively validated against C,
  N and water balance measurements from the Harvard
  Forest and other ecosystems.

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BlueSky-EM Overview

• Fire emissions
• regional to national scale 1 - 36 km spatial
  resolution
• temporal resolution hourly to multi-year
• chemical species include CO, CO2, PM10, PM2.5,
  CH4, EC, OC, NOx, NH4 and VOC
• accuracy equivalent to other emissions estimates
• Aggregation of existing models and datasets
• FCCS (default), NFDRS or Hardy fuel databases
• Consume (fuel consumption), Emission Processing
  Model (EPM), MM5 (met data)
• Has been linked to the SMOKE model in a recent
  development for EPA

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Flow DiagramBlueSky-EM and SMOKE
Fire Activity Data
Fuel Type Data
Met Data
Fuel Consumption
Heat Released
Emission Factors
Plume Rise
Emission Speciation
SMOKE
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NFDRS and FCCS Fuel Maps
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Integrated Meteorology-Chemistry Model (METCHEM)
Radiative Feedback of Aerosols
H V Transport, Cloud Physics Chemistry,
Gas/Particulate Chemistry, PM Microphysics
(Modal), Dry Wet Removal (MAQSIP CTM)
Met. Couple (MCPL)
Meteorology (MM5)
Emissions Processing (SMOKE)
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Radiation Scheme

• CCM2 radiation scheme in MM5
• d-Eddington approximation to calculate solar
  absorption with the solar spectrum divided into
  18 discrete intervals
• Absorption of O3, CO2, O2, and H2O
• Scattering and absorption of cloud droplets
• Aerosol optical properties were calculated by Mie
  scattering algorithm of Toon et al. (J. Atmos.
  Sci., 45, 1988) with refractive indices based on
  Stelson (Env. Sci. Technol., 24, 1990) this
  module has been updated in the past year.

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PnET Progress

• Implemented 4 versions of the model on CEP
  platforms after extensive consult w/ SGCP
• Visual Basic (June 05 version) MS SQL server
  from Southern Global Change Program,
  USFS-Raleigh
• C v4.1 (UNH)
• C daily version w/ CN (live biomass, litter
  and soil, nitrogen soil cycling) (UMN)
• Java (port from C) (CEP).
• Java version reproduced 10-year C simulation
  results for 1991-2001 using daily climatology
  from Harvard Forest (benchmark case).

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PnET Progress Details

• I/O Improvements
• More robust, flexible format for IC files (site,
  veg)
• netCDF replaces MS SQL important for common
  format of model I/O
• Java version has been tooled to read CCSM output
• http//www.ccsm.ucar.edu/
• Interpolated 2002 output to 36-km model grid
• Conversion factor for FSDS (downwelling solar
  flux) to PAR
• Conversion of large-scale and convective precip
  to rainfall rate for PnET
• Other accomplishments
• Created a CVS archive for the model
• build.xml file automatically compiles, builds and
  runs model with a single command.

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CCSM Output for 36-km Grid
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BlueSky-EM Progress

• Investigated pros and cons of Community Smoke
  Emissions Model and BlueSky-EM selected latter
  because of integration with SMOKE
• Downloaded the model and examined fuel databases
  (FCCS, NFDRS, Hardy)
• Have run examples provided for August 2002
  western U.S. simulation (WRAP EI)
• May 2002 run to generate emissions for Florida
  wild fires in progress.

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Modeling Domains and Time Periods

• Outer domain ConUS at 108-km to provide
  boundary conditions, especially on the western
  boundary to
• a nested SE US domain at 36-km resolution to use
  the full suite of models for the simulation of
  the interactions of forest biomass, fire
  emissions, AQ and climate
• Base year 2002
• 3 future years 2015, 2030 and 2050

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Modeling Domains
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Initial and Boundary Conditions

• Initial conditions assumed to be uniform,
  background values for each species
• Lateral boundary conditions for coarse grid
  derived from ConUS simulations for the base year
  (2002) from GEOSCHEM
• 9 gas-phase species PAN, CO, isoprene, HNO3,
  HCHO, N2O5, HNO4, O3, and SO2
• 5 aerosol species SO4, NH4, NO3, EC, and OM
• Will refine these with observational data and
  evaluated inputs from prior simulations for this
  period as appropriate.

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METCHEM Progress Radiative Transfer Model

• CCM2 calculates direct radiative forcing of
  aerosols using new module for aerosol optical
  properties
• Mie approximation for scattering and extinction
  efficiencies (Evans and Fournier, Appl. Optics,
  28, 1990) uses accumulation mode mean diameter
  and species concentrations from MAQSIP
• composite aerosol refractive index based on data
  from OPAC software package (Hess et al., BAMS,
  79, 1998).
• absorption algorithm based upon approach of
  Bohren and Nevitt (Appl. Optics, 22, 1983) for
  absorption efficiency
• asymmetry factor based upon empirical fit to Mie
  calculation (Hanna and Mathur)
• Fast optics uses analytical approach
  Heintzenberg and Baker (Appl. Optics, 15, 1976),
  and Willeke and Brockmann (AE 11, 1976)

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METCHEM Progress Aerosol Chemistry

• A supporting project for CMAS has enabled
  improvements in aerosol composition
  representation and interaction w/ sea salt
  species (Shankar et al., 2005)
• Corrected a bug in the mass transfer scheme for
  volatile species partitioning to the aerosol
  modes during CMAQ v4.5 AERO4 module development
• Currently modifying the aerosol speciation in the
  fine modes to port this correction to MAQSIP
• Coarse mode chemistry improvements on the way.
• http//www.cmascenter.org/conference/2005/blank.c
  fm?CONF_PRES_ID129

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Next Steps Data Linkages and Databases
2
1
PnET
Monthly met.
CCSM
Initial boundary met.
Base future year fuel data
Fire Simulator
3
Fire activity data
Hourly met
METCHEM (MM5-MCPL / MAQSIP)
Fire emissions /BlueSky
Modified biogenic land use data
5
4
Anthropogenic inventoried emissions
SMOKE
Gridded Speciated Emissions
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Next Steps Data Linkages

• PnET-BELD3
• create x-reference file to map FCCS fuel beds to
  BELD3 landuse data
• use fire version of Subregion Timber Supply
  (SRTS) Model to remove burned area veg link to
  BELD3
• PnET-BlueSky
• disaggregate FIA county-level plot data to FCCS
  1-km res to augment/replace FCCS data for future
  years
• BlueSky-BELD3
• represent burned land types in BELD3 (shrubland
  for VOC and misc cropland for NO others?)
• identify fire activity data sources for SE U.S.

34
Predicted southern pine distribution and NPP in
2040 using the Hadley2sul climate scenario on a
0.5 x 0.5 grid. Spatial modeling of the
eco-physiologic, hydrologic and economic impacts
of climate change on forested ecosytems of the
South Robert C. Abt, Rocky Durrans, Steve
McNulty, Brian Murray
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Next Steps Fire activity

• PnET -gt BELD3
• Generate potential future land cover for BELD3
  BlueSky (FCCS)
• Fire simulator
• Simulate potential future fire activity
  (magnitude, time location)
• BlueSky BELD3
• Emission projections from potential future fire
  activity

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Next Steps Data Linkages and Databases
future year Vegetation fuels
PnET
Future fire potential/ activity data
Met inputs
Modified biogenic land use data
Fire Simulator
BEIS 3
BlueSky-EM
Biogenic Emissions
Fire emissions
SMOKE
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Next Steps Models

• Evaluate sea salt model in METCHEM
• Finish evaluation of the radiative transfer model
• Test system for base year
• Adapt/alter the PNW Fire Scenario Builder
  McKenzie et al. (in press), 2006 for wild fires
  to simulate future year wild and prescribed fire
  activity in south and eastern US.
• Historical fire area burned by Bailey ecoprovince
• Statistical model area burned as f (met)
• Statistical model fire start intensity as f
  (NFDR)

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The End
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BlueSky/SMOKE Flow Diagram
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Combustion Emission Scaling Factors
CE DCO2 / DCODCO2 DCH4Dother MCE
0.15.86CE D .plume .
Emissions in g/kg
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Linked forest process, biogeography, economic
model structure. http//nigec.ucdavis.edu/publicat
ions/ar/annual99/southeast/SEAbt0.htmlresults