The 3D Dynamics of a Wildfire Plume Contained Within the Planetary
Boundary Layer Using an Airborne Doppler Lidar
Abstract
As wildfire pervasiveness increases with a changing climate, there is a
need to develop new techniques with emerging technologies to understand
the interaction between wildfires and the surrounding atmosphere at a
high spatiotemporal resolution. The Fire Influence on Regional to Global
Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) experiment conducted in 2019
focused on wildfires using several measurement platforms aboard
aircraft. In this study, we interpret wind measurements across a
boundary layer (BL) trapped smoke plume from an airborne Doppler lidar
(DL). Flight transects parallel and perpendicular to the orientation of
the plume enabled the characterization of key features such as a
fire-induced spanwise vortex, large downdrafts that modified the smoke
plume, and the evolving velocity structure at different distances
downwind of the fire-induced convergence zone (FICZ) at an unprecedented
horizontal and vertical resolution of 10s of meters.