Imperial College London
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ProfessorApostolosVoulgarakis

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Physics

Professor in Global Climate and Environmental Change
 
 
 
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Contact

 

a.voulgarakis Website

 
 
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Location

 

Huxley 709BHuxley BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Field:2016:10.1002/2015JD024343,
author = {Field, RD and Luo, M and Fromm, M and Voulgarakis, A and Mangeon, S and Worden, J},
doi = {10.1002/2015JD024343},
journal = {Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres},
pages = {4296--4316},
title = {Simulating the Black Saturday 2009 smoke plume with an interactive composition-climate model: sensitivity to emissions amount, timing, and injection height},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2015JD024343},
volume = {121},
year = {2016}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - We simulated the high-altitude smoke plume from the early February 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in southeastern Australia using the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE2. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first single-plume analysis of biomass burning emissions injected directly into the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere (UTLS) using a full-complexity composition-climate model. We compared simulated carbon monoxide (CO) to a new Aura Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer/Microwave Limb Sounder joint CO retrieval, focusing on the plume's initial transport eastward, anticyclonic circulation to the north of New Zealand, westward transport in the lower stratospheric easterlies, and arrival over Africa at the end of February. Our goal was to determine the sensitivity of the simulated plume to prescribed injection height, emissions amount, and emissions timing from different sources for a full-complexity model when compared to Aura. The most realistic plumes were obtained using injection heights in the UTLS, including one drawn from ground-based radar data. A 6 h emissions pulse or emissions tied to independent estimates of hourly fire behavior produced a more realistic plume in the lower stratosphere compared to the same emissions amount being released evenly over 12 or 24 h. Simulated CO in the plume was highly sensitive to the differences between emissions amounts estimated from the Global Fire Emissions Database and from detailed, ground-based estimates of fire growth. The emissions amount determined not only the CO concentration of the plume but also the proportion of the plume that entered the stratosphere. We speculate that this is due to either or both nonlinear CO loss with a weakened OH sink or plume self-lofting driven by shortwave absorption of the coemitted aerosols.
AU  - Field,RD
AU  - Luo,M
AU  - Fromm,M
AU  - Voulgarakis,A
AU  - Mangeon,S
AU  - Worden,J
DO  - 10.1002/2015JD024343
EP  - 4316
PY  - 2016///
SN  - 2169-8996
SP  - 4296
TI  - Simulating the Black Saturday 2009 smoke plume with an interactive composition-climate model: sensitivity to emissions amount, timing, and injection height
T2  - Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2015JD024343
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/33940
VL  - 121
ER  -
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