Interactions of fire emissions and urban pollution over California: Ozone formation and air quality simulations

An instrumented DC-8 aircraft was employed to perform airborne observations in rural and urban environs of California during the summer 2008 NASA ARCTAS-CARB campaign. The fortuitous occurrence of large wildfire episodes in Northern California allowed for studies of fire emissions, their composition, and their interactions with rural and urban air. Relative to CO, emissions of HCN were shown to vary non-linearly with fire characteristics while those of CH3CN were nearly unchanged, making the latter a superior quantitative tracer of biomass combustion. Although some fire plumes over California contained little NOx and virtually no O3 enhancement, others contained ample VOCs and sufficient NOx, largely from urban influences, to result in significant ozone formation. The highest observed O3 mixing ratios (170 ppb) were also in fire-influenced urban air masses. Attempts to simulate these interactions using CMAQ, a high-resolution state of the art air quality model, were only minimally successful and indicated several shortcomings in simulating fire emission influences on urban smog formation. A variety of secondary oxidation products (e.g. O3, PAN, HCHO) were substantially underestimated in fire-influenced air masses. Available data involving fire plumes and anthropogenic pollution interactions are presently quite sparse and additional observational and mechanistic studies are needed.

► Forest fire plumes produce significant ozone when mixed with urban pollution.
► Models are unable to simulate interactions of fire emissions with urban smog.
► Available data on fire emissions and smog interactions are sparse.
► Fire emissions may be poorly characterized and underestimated.