Smoke and Air Quality

Background. Prescribed fire is a land management tool used extensively across the United States. Owing to health and safety risks, smoke emitted by burns requires appropriate manage- ment. Smoke modelling tools are often used to mitigate air pollution impacts. However, direct comparisons of tools’ predictions are lacking. Aims.

Background: Fire research and management applications, such as fire behaviour analysis and emissions modelling, require consistent, highly resolved spatiotemporal information on wildfire growth progression.

Extreme wildfires threaten human lives, air quality, and ecosystems. Meteorology plays a vital role in wildfire behaviors, and the links between wildfires and climate have been widely studied. However, it is not fully clear how fire-weather feedback affects short-term wildfire variability, which undermines our ability to mitigate fire disasters.

Highlights • Wildfire may exacerbate health disparities & environmental justice concerns. • Low-cost PM2.5 sensors improve wildfire impact assessment. • Increases in PM2.5 correlate with wildfire activity (within 30 km). • Indoor increases in PM2.5 concentrations mimic outdoor PM2.5 increase patterns.

Wildfires and meteorological conditions influence the co-occurrence of multiple harmful air pollutants including fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ground-level ozone. We examine the spatiotemporal characteristics of PM2.5/ ozone co-occurrences and associated population exposure in the western United States (US).

Smoke from wildfires has become a growing public health issue around the world but especially in western North America and California. At the same time, managers and scientists recommend thinning and intentional use of wildland fires to restore forest health and reduce smoke from poorly controlled wildfires.

Rapidly scaling up the use of prescribed fire is being promoted as an important pathway for reducing the growing damages of wildfire events in the United States, including limiting the health impacts from smoke emissions.

Background: Efforts to mitigate the adverse effects of wildfire smoke have focused on modifying human behaviour to minimise individual exposure, largely accomplished by providing smoke forecasts, monitoring, and consistent public messaging. Aims: To identify a strategy to reduce the amount of wildfire smoke in frequently impacted communities.

Pollution from wildfires constitutes a growing source of poor air quality globally. To protect health, governments largely rely on citizens to limit their own wildfire smoke exposures, but the effectiveness of this strategy is hard to observe.

By producing a frst-of-its-kind, decadal-scale wildfre plume rise climatology in the Western U.S. and Canada, we identify trends toward enhanced plume top heights, aerosol loading aloft, and nearsurface smoke injection throughout the American West.