Where there is smoke there is mercury: Assessing boreal forest fire mercury emissions using aircraft and highlighting uncertainties associated with upscaling emissions estimates

McLagan, David S.; Stupple, Geoff W.; Darlington, Andrea; Hayden, Katherine; Steffen, Alexandra

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-5635-2021

Articles | Volume 21, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-5635-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Research results from the 14th International Conference on...

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-5635-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 7

Research article

|

14 Apr 2021

Research article |

| 14 Apr 2021

Where there is smoke there is mercury: Assessing boreal forest fire mercury emissions using aircraft and highlighting uncertainties associated with upscaling emissions estimates

David S. McLagan, Geoff W. Stupple, Andrea Darlington, Katherine Hayden, and Alexandra Steffen

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Final revised paper (published on 14 Apr 2021)
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Preprint (discussion started on 06 Nov 2020)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'review comments', Anonymous Referee #1, 11 Jan 2021
RC2: 'review', Anonymous Referee #2, 29 Jan 2021
RC3: 'Where there is a smoke there is mercury', Anonymous Referee #3, 01 Feb 2021
AC1: 'Comment on acp-2020-1119', Sandy Steffen, 23 Feb 2021

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Sandy Steffen on behalf of the Authors (25 Feb 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (27 Feb 2021) by Aurélien Dommergue

AR by Sandy Steffen on behalf of the Authors (04 Mar 2021)

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Short summary

An assessment of mercury emissions from a burning boreal forest was made by flying an aircraft through its plume to collect in situ gas and particulate measurements. Direct data show that in-plume gaseous elemental mercury concentrations reach up to 2.4× background for this fire and up to 5.6× when using a correlation with CO data. These unique data are applied to a series of known empirical emissions estimates and used to highlight current uncertainties in the literature.