Abstract
The fires around Moscow in July and August 2010 emitted a large amount of pollutants to the atmosphere. Here we estimate the carbon monoxide (CO) source strength of the Moscow fires in July and August by using the TM5-4DVAR system in combination with CO column observations of the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI). It is shown that the IASI observations provide a strong constraint on the total emissions needed in the model. Irrespective of the prior emissions used, the optimised CO fire emission estimates from mid-July to mid-August 2010 amount to approximately 24 TgCO. This estimate depends only weakly (<15 %) on the assumed diurnal variations and injection height of the emissions. However, the estimated emissions might depend on unaccounted model uncertainties such as vertical transport. Our emission estimate of 22-27 TgCO during roughly one month of intense burning is less than suggested by another recent study, but substantially larger than predicted by the bottom-up inventories. This latter discrepancy suggests that bottom-up emission estimates for extreme peat burning events require improvements.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 4737-4747 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Atmospheric chemistry and physics |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |
Funding
The authors would like to acknowledge the European Space Agency (ESA) for the funding through the Atmosphere-LANd Integrated Study (ALANIS) and the Dutch National Computing Facilities Foundation (NCF) for the use of supercomputer facilities. NOAA is acknowledged for the use CO observations from the surface network. Guido van der Werf is acknowledged for providing the GFED data. The GFAS work is funded by the MACC project, contract number 218793 in the EU Seventh Research Framework Programme. The MOPITT data were obtained from the Atmospheric Science Data Center at the NASA Langley Research Center. IASI was developed and built under the responsibility of CNES and flies onboard the MetOp satellite as part of the Eumetsat Polar system. The authors acknowledge the Ether French atmospheric database (http://ether.ipsl.jussieu.fr) for distributing the IASI L1C and L2-CO data. We acknowledge Rainer Konigstedt and Horst Fischer for the CO data from the HUMPPA-COPEC-2010 campaign. CO measurements from the Moscow station were kindly provided by Alex Safronov.
Keywords
- RUSSIAN WILDFIRES
- EMISSIONS
- POLLUTION
- SUMMER
- IASI
- ASSIMILATION
- RETRIEVAL
- SATELLITE
- ALGORITHM
- TRANSPORT