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

Jianping Mao; James B Abshire; Stephan R Kawa; Haris Riris; Xiaoli Sun; Niels Andela; Paul T Kolbeck

doi:10.1029/2021GL093805

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

Geophys Res Lett. 2021 Aug 28;48(16):e2021GL093805. doi: 10.1029/2021GL093805. Epub 2021 Aug 23.

Authors

Jianping Mao^{1

2}, James B Abshire^{1

2}, Stephan R Kawa², Haris Riris², Xiaoli Sun², Niels Andela³, Paul T Kolbeck¹

Affiliations

¹ University of Maryland College Park MD USA.
² NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt MD USA.
³ Cardiff University Cardiff UK.

Abstract

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.

Keywords: CO2 emission; airborne campaign; carbon dioxide; greenhouse gas; lidar; wildfires.