Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

Publisher

Published by Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union

Publication Date

6-17-2015

Volume

15

Disciplines

Biochemistry | Chemistry | Life Sciences | Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Abstract

Within minutes after emission, complex photochemistry in biomass burning smoke plumes can cause large changes in the concentrations of ozone (O3) and organic aerosol (OA). Being able to understand and simulate this rapid chemical evolution under a wide variety of conditions is a critical part of forecasting the impact of these fires on air quality, atmospheric composition, and climate. Here we use version 2.1 of the Aerosol Simulation Program (ASP) to simulate the evolution of O3 and secondary organic aerosol (SOA) within a young biomass burning smoke plume from the Williams prescribed fire in chaparral, which was sampled over California in November 2009. We demonstrate the use of a method for simultaneously accounting for the impact of the unidentified intermediate volatility, semi-volatile, and extremely low volatility organic compounds (here collectively called "SVOCs") on the formation of OA (using the Volatility Basis Set VBS) and O3 (using the concept of mechanistic reactivity). We show that this method can successfully simulate the observations of O3, OA, NOx , ethylene (C2H4), and OH to within measurement uncertainty using reasonable assumptions about the average chemistry of the unidentified SVOCs.

DOI

10.5194/acp-15-6667-2015

Rights

© Author(s) 2015.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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