Chemical Tomography in a Fresh Wildland Fire Plume: a Large Eddy
Simulation (LES) Study
Abstract
Wildland fires involve complicated processes that are challenging to
represent in chemical transport models. Recent airborne measurements
reveal remarkable chemical tomography in fresh wildland fire plumes,
which remain yet to be fully explored using models. Here we present a
high-resolution large eddy simulation (LES) model coupled to chemistry
to study the chemical evolution in fresh wildland fire plume. The model
is configured for a large fire heavily sampled during the Fire Influence
on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) field
campaign, and a variety of airborne measurements are used to evaluate
the chemical heterogeneity revealed by the model. We show that the model
captures the observed cross-transect variations of a number of compounds
quite well, including ozone (O3), nitrous acid (HONO),
and peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN), etc. The combined observational and
modeling results suggest that the top and edges of fresh plume drive the
photochemistry, while dark chemistry is also present but in the lower
part of the plume. The model spatial resolution is shown to be very
important as it may shift the chemical regime, leading to biases in
O3 and NOx chemistry. Based on findings
in this work, we speculate that the impact of small fires on air quality
may be largely underestimated in models with coarse spatial resolutions.