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Author(s):
Stephanie Redfern, Julie Lundquist, Owen B. Toon, Domingo Muñoz-Esparza, Charles G. Bardeen
Year Published:

Cataloging Information

Topic(s):
Fire Behavior
Weather
Smoke & Air Quality
Fire & Smoke Models
Smoke Emissions
Smoke Emissions and Inventory

NRFSN number: 24024
FRAMES RCS number: 64702
Record updated:

Large areal fires, such as those ignited following a nuclear detonation, can inject smoke into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. Detailed fire simulations allow for assessment of how local weather interacts with these fires and affects smoke lofting. In this study, we employ the fire simulation package in the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF-Fire), Version 4.0.1, to explore how smoke lofting from a fire burning a homogeneous fuel bed changes with varying local winds, relative humidity, and atmospheric boundary-layer stability for two different-sized areal fires. The presence of moisture has the greatest influence on the results by raising the altitude of lofting, while faster winds speeds dampen lofting and lower the injection height. Stably stratified conditions inhibit plume propagation compared with neutrally stratified conditions, although the impact of stability is not as strong as that of moisture and winds. These findings highlight the importance of using an appropriate atmospheric profile when simulating large fires, as the local weather can have a meaningful influence on smoke lofting.

Citation

Redfern, Stephanie; Lundquist, Julie K.; Toon, Owen B.; Muñoz-Esparza, Domingo; Bardeen, Charles G.; Kosović, Branko. 2021. Upper troposphere smoke injection from large areal fires. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 126(23):e2020JD034332. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JD034332

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