Impacts of California Wildfires on CO₂ and Other Trace Gases

Creators: Karandana Gamalathge, Thishan Dharshana¹; Tai, Nolan^{2, 3}; Jiang, Xun¹; Wang, Xinyue¹; Li, Liming¹; Yung, Yuk L.²

1. University of Houston
2. California Institute of Technology
3. Troy High School, Fullerton, CA, USA

Abstract

Wildfires have broad impacts on the atmosphere, ecology, and society. This study leverages satellite data and chemistry‐transport models to analyze the impact of wildfires on trace gases in California during the August‐October periods of 2018, 2019, and 2020. During these months, Southern California experiences minimal precipitation, leading to a high Vapor Pressure Deficit, which results in decreased photosynthetic activities. This reduction, combined with increased biomass burning, causes a rise in CO₂ concentrations. Increased CO and CH₄ levels are also seen in TROPOMI retrievals tied to the increase in biomass burning. The CarbonTracker model captures these elevated CO₂ concentrations, though with a reduced amplitude of increased CO₂. Similarly, the GEOS‐Chem model successfully simulates high CO levels but underestimates the observed enhancements. These findings will improve the understanding of fire's influence on trace gases and refine future numerical models on surface emissions and transport.

Copyright and License

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Acknowledgement

This project is funded by NASA grant NNX16AG46G. We thank the anonymous referees and the editor for their time and constructive suggestions.

Funding

This project is funded by NASA grant NNX16AG46G.

Contributions

Conceptualization: Thishan Dharshana Karandana Gamalathge, Nolan Tai, Xun Jiang, Xinyue Wang.
Data curation: Thishan Dharshana Karandana Gamalathge, Nolan Tai, Xun Jiang, Xinyue Wang.
Formal analysis: Thishan Dharshana Karandana Gamalathge, Nolan Tai, Xun Jiang, Xinyue Wang.
Funding acquisition: Xun Jiang.
Investigation: Thishan Dharshana Karandana Gamalathge, Nolan Tai, Xun Jiang, Xinyue Wang.
Methodology: Thishan Dharshana Karandana Gamalathge, Nolan Tai, Xun Jiang, Xinyue Wang.

Data Availability

We downloaded OCO2 CO₂ data (Crisp et al., 2017) at https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/datasets?keywords=oco-2&page=1. TROPOMI data (Kohler et al., 2018; Landgraf et al., 2016; Veefkind et al., 2012) are from https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search?fi=TROPOMI. Precipitation data (Adler et al., 2018) are from https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.gpcp.html. MODIS data (Giglio et al., 2018) are from http://modis-fire.umd.edu/.

Supplemental Material

Supporting information (PDF).

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