Articles | Volume 21, issue 18
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-14427-2021
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-14427-2021
Research article
 | 
29 Sep 2021
Research article |  | 29 Sep 2021

Evaluation and intercomparison of wildfire smoke forecasts from multiple modeling systems for the 2019 Williams Flats fire

Xinxin Ye, Pargoal Arab, Ravan Ahmadov, Eric James, Georg A. Grell, Bradley Pierce, Aditya Kumar, Paul Makar, Jack Chen, Didier Davignon, Greg R. Carmichael, Gonzalo Ferrada, Jeff McQueen, Jianping Huang, Rajesh Kumar, Louisa Emmons, Farren L. Herron-Thorpe, Mark Parrington, Richard Engelen, Vincent-Henri Peuch, Arlindo da Silva, Amber Soja, Emily Gargulinski, Elizabeth Wiggins, Johnathan W. Hair, Marta Fenn, Taylor Shingler, Shobha Kondragunta, Alexei Lyapustin, Yujie Wang, Brent Holben, David M. Giles, and Pablo E. Saide

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Cited articles

Abatzoglou, J. T. and Williams, A. P.: Impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western US forests, P. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 113, 11770–11775, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1607171113, 2016. 
Ahmadov, R., Grell, G., James, E., Csiszar, I., Tsidulko, M., Pierce, B., McKeen, S., Benjamin, S., Alexander, C., Pereira, G., Freitas, S., and Goldberg, M.: Using VIIRS fire radiative power data to simulate biomass burning emissions, plume rise and smoke transport in a real-time air quality modeling system, in: 2017 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2806–2808, 2017. 
Ahmadov, R., James, E., Grell, G. A., Alexander, C., Olson, J., Benjamin, S., McKeen, S. A., Bela, M., Hamilton, J., and Wong, K. Y.: High-resolution (3 km) forecasting of smoke and visibility for the US by ingesting the VIIRS and MODIS FRP data into HRRR-Smoke during August 2018, in: AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, A51F-08, 2019. 
Albayrak, A., Wei, J., Petrenko, M., Lynnes, C., and Levy, R. C.: Global bias adjustment for MODIS aerosol optical thickness using neural network, J. Appl. Remote Sens., 7, 073514, https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JRS.7.073514, 2013. 
Anderson, K., Pankratz, A., and Mooney, C.: A thermodynamic approach to estimating smoke plume heights, in: Proceedings of Ninth Symposium on Fire and Forest Meteorology, Palms Springs, CA, American Meteorological Society, 17–21, 2011. 
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Short summary
Wildfire smoke has crucial impacts on air quality, while uncertainties in the numerical forecasts remain significant. We present an evaluation of 12 real-time forecasting systems. Comparison of predicted smoke emissions suggests a large spread in magnitudes, with temporal patterns deviating from satellite detections. The performance for AOD and surface PM2.5 and their discrepancies highlighted the role of accurately represented spatiotemporal emission profiles in improving smoke forecasts.
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