Research shows why fire inversions happen and offers new air quality prediction tools.
Smoke from a summer wildfire is more than just an eye-stinging plume of nuisance. It’s a poison to the lungs and hearts of the people who breathe it in and a dense blanket that hampers firefighting operations.
There’s an atmospheric feedback loop, says University of Utah atmospheric scientist Adam Kochanski, that can lock smoke in valleys in much the same way that temperature inversions lock the smog and gunk in the Salt Lake Valley each winter. But understanding this loop, Kochanski says, can help scientists predict how smoke will impact air quality in valleys, hopefully helping both residents and firefighters alike.
Kochanski and colleagues’ study appears in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres. The work was funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and from NASA.
In 2015, firefighters battling wildfires in northern California noticed that smoke accumulating in valleys wasn’t going away. The smoke got so bad that air support had to cancel flights, slowing down the firefighting effort. “That raised the question,” Kochanski says, “Why is that? Why all of a sudden, is the smoke so persistent and what keeps this very thick layer of smoke in those valleys for such a long period of time?”
Kochanski and his colleagues, including researchers from the Desert Research Institute, University of Colorado, Boulder and Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics set out to answer those questions. Their first clue came from measurements of temperature both below and above the smoke layer. The air, they found, was warmer above the smoke than below.
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