Causes of Haze Assessment Update for Fire Emissions Joint Forum -12/9/04 Meeting Marc Pitchford

Causes of Haze Assessment (COHA) Overview –Starting the third year of a 4-year contract effort to use ambient monitoring data & some emissions information to assess haze influential factors (e.g. aerosol species, atmospheric processes, source types & regions) –Assessment information & products are stored & distributed on the COHA web site (no paper report) –Primary uses of the COHA products are to support the technical assessments for SIPs & TIPs, and specifically the Attribution of Haze Workgroup effort

COHA Tasks Completed for each Class I Area –Emissions mapping & Descriptions (maps of NO x, SO 2 & fire within 20km) –Monitoring Site Setting Descriptions (maps of terrain, land- use, air quality & met. monitoring sites, urban & industrial locations) –Meteorological Site Setting Descriptions (local flow patterns, site representativeness, climate data, etc.) –Aerosol Descriptions (figures, tables, & text of typical, best & worst aerosol components, monthly distribution & composition of worst days) –Back Trajectory Analysis (3 years of 8 per day 8-day back trajectories at 3 starting heights [>3 million trajectories], summary maps of all days, best & worst haze days, best & worst for each component days, etc [>5000 summary maps]) –Trajectory Regression Analysis (statistical relationship between transport time over source regions & air quality measured at the monitoring site, sufficient data at about 80 sites, used by the AOH workgroup to compare to WRAP modeling attribution results

Bandelier Wilderness Area : Nearby Emissions

US Fire Database US National fire database 1970 to 2002 reported by USFS, BLM, BIA, NPS, FWS Key Data Fields: Lat/long Fire start date (date discovered & controlled on USFS land only) Area Cause QA flags (DRI)

Canadian Fire Database Canadian Large Fire Database 1959 to1999 Large forest fires in Canada, 1959–1997, Stocks et al., 2003 J.G.R. Key Data Fields: Lat/long Province Region Fire start date Size Cause

MODIS Fire Database Key Data Fields: Lat/long Fire start date Brightness temp Pixels 2001 to present from Forest Service, Remote Sensing Application Center The fire detections are discerned using the 1-km thermal bands of MODIS. Detections are provided as the centroids of the 1-km pixels fires shown here

NOAA NESDID Satellite Services Division Fire Database 2003 to present Detections from GOES, AVHRR, DMSP/OLS and MODIS Archived visible smoke plume polygons Key Data Fields: Lat/long Time

Alaska Fire Database Alaska Forest Service Large wildland fires from 1950 to 2003 Provides only year not day Key Data Fields: Lat/long Year Area, perimeter Fire ID

Example Trajectory Summary Maps Bandelier National Park – residence time maps show fraction of transport hours spent over each 1 o by 1 o cell. Top map shows the residence time for the worst 20% haze days Bottom map shows the residence time for the best 20% haze days

Trajectory Regression Results Bar graphs of concentration & percent contributions associated with 15 to 20 source regions Source regions are based on state borders Includes statistical uncertainty bars & tabular regression analysis output (not shown) Currently applied to sulfate and aerosol extinction data

COHA Tasks To be completed –Episode analysis (custom assessment of causes of worst haze periods using supplemental information, examples: forest fires, regional & global dust, eastern sulfate transported west, west coast nitrates, etc) ~10 episodes completed to date –Receptor modeling (more transport regression, CMB, etc.) –Update previous work with additional data

Additional COHA Activities Tribal Causes of Haze (conduct COHA for tribal Class I Areas, assess regional haze monitoring needs for tribal lands) Dust Causes of Haze (develop methods to characterize dust by source type/geographic scale, apply method to several years of data)