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Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ)

  • The FIREX-AQ Science Team
  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
  • University of New Hampshire
  • California Institute of Technology
  • NASA Langley Research Center
  • National Institute of Aerospace
  • National Aeronautics and Space Administration
  • Aerodyne Research, Inc.
  • Research Division
  • University of Washington
  • Lewis-Clark State College
  • University of Montana
  • NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
  • Science Systems and Applications, Inc.
  • Université de Lille
  • Cimel Electronique
  • University of Colorado Boulder
  • University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Naval Research Laboratory
  • University of California at Los Angeles
  • Florida State University
  • Paul Scherrer Institute
  • Jülich Research Centre
  • Environment and Climate Change Canada
  • Georgia Institute of Technology

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

92 Scopus citations

Abstract

The NOAA/NASA Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) experiment was a multi-agency, inter-disciplinary research effort to: (a) obtain detailed measurements of trace gas and aerosol emissions from wildfires and prescribed fires using aircraft, satellites and ground-based instruments, (b) make extensive suborbital remote sensing measurements of fire dynamics, (c) assess local, regional, and global modeling of fires, and (d) strengthen connections to observables on the ground such as fuels and fuel consumption and satellite products such as burned area and fire radiative power. From Boise, ID western wildfires were studied with the NASA DC-8 and two NOAA Twin Otter aircraft. The high-altitude NASA ER-2 was deployed from Palmdale, CA to observe some of these fires in conjunction with satellite overpasses and the other aircraft. Further research was conducted on three mobile laboratories and ground sites, and 17 different modeling forecast and analyses products for fire, fuels and air quality and climate implications. From Salina, KS the DC-8 investigated 87 smaller fires in the Southeast with remote and in-situ data collection. Sampling by all platforms was designed to measure emissions of trace gases and aerosols with multiple transects to capture the chemical transformation of these emissions and perform remote sensing observations of fire and smoke plumes under day and night conditions. The emissions were linked to fuels consumed and fire radiative power using orbital and suborbital remote sensing observations collected during overflights of the fires and smoke plumes and ground sampling of fuels.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere2022JD037758
JournalJournal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
Volume128
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 27 2023

Funding

The authors acknowledge generous support from the NOAA AC4 program from FIREX Firelab and FIREX‐AQ. The authors thank the AERONET (NASA GSFC and LOA PHOTONS) and Cimel Electronique teams for providing instrumentation, calibration, measurements and data processing for the mobile DRAGON measurements as well as NASA AERONET staff for coordination with the US Forest Service, Fire Chemistry Lab and the University of Idaho Taylor Ranch Wilderness School staff for set up maintenance and decommission of the stationary DRAGON networks. The authors acknowledge the use of imagery from the NASA Worldview application ( https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov ), part of the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). Part of this work was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). The authors acknowledge generous support from the NOAA AC4 program from FIREX Firelab and FIREX-AQ. The authors thank the AERONET (NASA GSFC and LOA PHOTONS) and Cimel Electronique teams for providing instrumentation, calibration, measurements and data processing for the mobile DRAGON measurements as well as NASA AERONET staff for coordination with the US Forest Service, Fire Chemistry Lab and the University of Idaho Taylor Ranch Wilderness School staff for set up maintenance and decommission of the stationary DRAGON networks. The authors acknowledge the use of imagery from the NASA Worldview application (https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov), part of the NASA Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). Part of this work was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). FIREX‐AQ was primarily funded by the public through support of NOAA and NASA research and the full quality‐assured data set acquired from all aspects of the mission and value‐added products described below are publicly available. The data can be found on the FIREX‐AQ website ( https://www-air.larc.nasa.gov/missions/firex-aq/ ) and the data archive ( https://doi.org/10.5067/SUBORBITAL/FIREXAQ2019/DATA001 ) (FIREX‐AQ science team, 2019 ). A custom merging tool is available that can generate the full data set or just a subset.

FundersFunder number
National Aeronautics and Space Administration80NM0018D0004
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
U.S. Forest Service-Retired

    UN SDGs

    This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

    1. SDG 13 - Climate Action
      SDG 13 Climate Action

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