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. Highly unusual open fires burned in western Greenland between 31 July and21 August 2017, after a period of warm, dry and sunny weather. The firesburned on peatlands that became vulnerable to fires by permafrost thawing.We used several satellite data sets to estimate that the total area burnedwas about 2345 ha. Based on assumptions of typical burn depths andemission factors for peat fires, we estimate that the fires consumed a fuelamount of about 117 kt C and emitted about 23.5 t of black carbon (BC) and731 t of organic carbon (OC), including 141 t of brown carbon (BrC). We useda Lagrangian particle dispersion model to simulate the atmospheric transportand deposition of these species. We find that the smoke plumes were oftenpushed towards the Greenland ice sheet by westerly winds, and thus a largefraction of the emissions (30 %) was deposited on snow- or ice-coveredsurfaces. The calculated deposition was small compared to the deposition fromglobal sources, but not entirely negligible. Analysis of aerosol opticaldepth data from three sites in western Greenland in August 2017 showed stronginfluence of forest fire plumes from Canada, but little impact of theGreenland fires. Nevertheless, CALIOP (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization) lidar data showed that our modelcaptured the presence and structure of the plume from the Greenland fires.The albedo changes and instantaneous surface radiative forcing in Greenlanddue to the fire emissions were estimated with the SNICAR model and the uvspecmodel from the libRadtran radiative transfer software package. We estimatethat the maximum albedo change due to the BC and BrC deposition was about0.007, too small to be measured. The average instantaneous surface radiativeforcing over Greenland at noon on 31 August was 0.03–0.04 W m −2 , withlocally occurring maxima of 0.63–0.77 W m −2 (depending on the studiedscenario). The average value is up to an order of magnitude smaller than theradiative forcing from other sources. Overall, the fires burning in Greenlandin the summer of 2017 had little impact on the Greenland ice sheet, causing asmall extra radiative forcing. This was due to the – in a global context –still rather small size of the fires. However, the very large fraction of theemissions deposited on the Greenland ice sheet from these fires couldcontribute to accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet if these firesbecome several orders of magnitude larger under future climate.

Open fires in Greenland in summer 2017: transport, deposition and radiative effects of BC, OC and BrC emissions