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Measuring Atmospheric CO 2 Enhancements From the 2017 British Columbia Wildfires Using a Lidar
Author(s) -
Mao Jianping,
Abshire James B.,
Kawa Stephan R.,
Riris Haris,
Sun Xiaoli,
Andela Niels,
Kolbeck Paul T.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2021gl093805
Subject(s) - lidar , environmental science , remote sensing , meteorology , atmospheric sciences , geology , geography
During the summer 2017 ASCENDS/ABoVE airborne science campaign, the NASA Goddard CO 2 Sounder lidar overflew smoke plumes from wildfires in the British Columbia, Canada. In the flight path over Vancouver Island on 8 August 2017, the column XCO 2 retrievals from the lidar measurements at flight altitudes around 9 km showed an average enhancement of 4 ppm from the wildfires. A comparison of these enhancements with those from the Goddard Global Chemistry Transport model suggested that the modeled CO 2 emissions from wildfires were underestimated by more than a factor of 2. A spiral‐down validation performed at Moses Lake airport, Washington showed a bias of 0.1 ppm relative to in situ measurements and a standard deviation of 1 ppm in lidar XCO 2 retrievals. The results show that future airborne campaigns and spaceborne missions with this type of lidar can improve estimates of CO 2 emissions from wildfires and estimates of carbon fluxes globally.