Satellite Multi-angle Observations of Wildfire Smoke Plumes During the
CalFiDE Field Campaign: Aerosol Plume Heights, Particle Property
Evolution, and Aging Timescales
Abstract
Wildfire-related aircraft field campaigns frequently offer opportunities
to validate remote-sensing retrievals of aerosol properties and other
quantities derived from satellite-borne-instrument observations.
Satellite instruments often provide regional context-imagery for more
sparsely sampled aircraft and surface-based measurements. However,
aerosol amount, particle type, aerosol plume height and the associated
wind vector products retrieved from the NASA Earth Observing System’s
Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument have matured
sufficiently that these quantities can also contribute substantially to
a campaign dataset, in regional context. This is especially useful when
such measurements are not acquired at all from the suborbital platforms.
During NOAA’s California Fire Dynamics Experiment (CalFiDE), aircraft
operations were coordinated with MISR overpasses on two occasions, for
the Rum Creek fire on 30 August 2022, and for the Mosquito fire on 08
September. MISR-retrieved aerosol properties show distinctly different
patterns of black and brown smoke particle distributions and inferred
plume evolution in the two cases. This paper describes the satellite
data analysis techniques and presents the satellite-retrieved results,
demonstrating what such measurements can offer, and contributing
material for detailed fire dynamics and chemistry studies when combined
with the CalFiDE suborbital observations and models.