Identification

Title

Formaldehyde evolution in US wildfire plumes during the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality experiment (FIREX-AQ)

Abstract

Formaldehyde (HCHO) is one of the most abundant non-methane volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by fires. HCHO also undergoes chemical production and loss as a fire plume ages, and it can be an important oxidant precursor. In this study, we disentangle the processes controlling HCHO by examining its evolution in wildfire plumes sampled by the NASA DC-8 during the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality experiment (FIREX-AQ) field campaign. In 9 of the 12 analyzed plumes, dilution-normalized HCHO increases with physical age (range 1-6 h). The balance of HCHO loss (mainly via photolysis) and production (via OH-initiated VOC oxidation) seems to control the sign and magnitude of this trend. Plume-average OH concentrations, calculated from VOC decays, range from -0.5 (+/- 0.5) x 10(6) to 5.3 (+/- 0.7) x 10(6) cm(-3). The production and loss rates of dilution-normalized HCHO seem to decrease with plume age. Plume-to-plume variability in dilution-normalized secondary HCHO production correlates with OH abundance rather than normalized OH reactivity, suggesting that OH is the main driver of fire-to-fire variability in HCHO secondary production. Analysis suggests an effective HCHO yield of 0.33 (+/- 0.05) per VOC molecule oxidized for the 12 wildfire plumes. This finding can help connect space-based HCHO observations to the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere and to VOC emissions.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d75h7ksv

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2021-12-17T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact