Measuring Atmospheric CO2 Enhancements from the 2017 British Columbia 1 Wildfires Using a Lidar

During the summer 2017 ASCENDS/ABoVE airborne science campaign, the NASA Goddard CO2 Sounder lidar overflew smoke plumes from wildfires in the British Columbia, Canada. In the flight path over Vancouver Island on 8 August 2017, the column XCO2 retrievals from the lidar measurements at flight altitud...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Geophysical research letters Vol. 48; no. 16
Main Authors:	Mao, Jianping, Abshire, James B, Kawa, S Randy, Riris, Haris, Sun, Xiaoli, Andela, Niels, Kobeck, Paul T
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	Goddard Space Flight Center Wiley 12-08-2021
Subjects:	Earth Resources And Remote Sensing
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	During the summer 2017 ASCENDS/ABoVE airborne science campaign, the NASA Goddard CO2 Sounder lidar overflew smoke plumes from wildfires in the British Columbia, Canada. In the flight path over Vancouver Island on 8 August 2017, the column XCO2 retrievals from the lidar measurements at flight altitudes around 9 km showed an average enhancement of 4 ppm from the wildfires. A comparison of these enhancements with those from the Goddard Global Chemistry Transport model suggested that the modeled CO2 emissions from wildfires were underestimated by more than a factor of 2. A spiral-down validation performed at Moses Lake airport, Washington showed a bias of 0.1 ppm relative to in situ measurements and a standard deviation of 1 ppm in lidar XCO2 retrievals. The results show that future airborne campaigns and spaceborne missions with this type of lidar can improve estimates of CO2 emissions from wildfires and estimates of carbon fluxes globally.
Bibliography:	GSFC Goddard Space Flight Center
ISSN:	0094-8276 1944-8007
DOI:	10.1029/2021GL093805