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The 3D Dynamics of a Wildfire Plume Contained Within the Planetary Boundary Layer Using an Airborne Doppler Lidar
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  • Edward Strobach,
  • Sunil Baidar,
  • Brian J. Carroll,
  • Alan Brewer
Edward Strobach
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Sunil Baidar
NOAA CIRES
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Brian J. Carroll
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)
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Alan Brewer
NOAA Chemical Sciences Laboratory
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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.
22 Oct 2024Submitted to ESS Open Archive
23 Oct 2024Published in ESS Open Archive