Inventory of Speciated Non-methane Organic Compounds Emissions from Open Biomass Burning

Description

Accurate biomass burning emissions are critical inputs to chemical transport and climate models investigating the effects of aerosols on the radiative balance of the atmosphere. In this work, we develop new global gridded emissions of complete speciated non-methane organic compounds (NMOCs) from wildfires. Preliminary results show that our emissions of NMOCs from biomass burning are two to three times larger than indicated by other emission inventories. Our new emission estimates are based on a review of recent laboratory and field measurements of a number of biomass burning types including tropical forests, temperate forests, boreal forests, peatlands, savanna/grasslands/wood shrubs, and agricultural crop residue. These recent studies provide relatively complete NMOC speciation profile for individual biomass burning types and suggest that the NMOC emission factors of fires are larger than the ones commonly used in emission inventories such as GFED, QFED, and FINN. Not only is the magnitude of the total NMOC emissions larger, but the emissions of chemical species that efficiently participate in secondary reactions to create ozone (O3) and secondary organic aerosols (SOA) are larger. We therefore expect that the NMOC emissions of biomass burning developed in this work will substantially increase the concentrations of O3 and SOA in the model simulations. The newly developed emissions improve the representation of speciated NMOC emissions originated from biomass burning and will help us better understand the formation, growth, removal, and direct/semi-direct radiative effects of both primary and secondary atmospheric aerosols from wildfires.