All posts in “Fire Science”

By Air Sciences Inc.

Advanced Wildfire Smoke Tracking for Legal Clarity and Support, Part I

In recent decades, wildfire size and intensity worldwide have increased significantly alongside rising global temperatures.

Scientific studies using satellite data over the past 20 years show that extreme wildfires have more than doubled in frequency and intensity globally, particularly in northern and temperate forests such as western North America, boreal forests of northern North America and Russia, and parts of Australia. These wildfires have driven significant legal actions as affected parties seek compensation for damages. The economic impact spans sectors including agriculture, forestry, tourism, and infrastructure, compounding financial pressures on communities and insurers and fueling litigation over liability and compensation. This trend is expected to persist or worsen in coming years.

Read more

The TEMPO Mission: Measuring Urban Pollution from Space

One Air Sciences’ team member’s graduate research at Portland State University (Oregon) clocked a lot of time with a tabletop ultraviolet (UV)-visible spectrometer. This equipment measures how much a chemical substance absorbs light. You see, Matt had painstakingly prepared hundreds of passive air pollution monitoring devices to conduct high-density measurements of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in east Portland. To “extract” the adsorbed NO2 from the devices, an aqueous solution was prepared with spectral properties that changed with the amount of NO2 present. Perfect, tedious work for a grad student, but it ultimately produced some gratifying results.

Read more

The Regional Haze Rule, Part III

In our last post on this topic we left off asking the question, “given how much wildland fires change year to year, how do we build an emissions inventory (EI) that is representative of a multi-year period, or a future period?” This is a confounding problem not only for the Regional Haze planning process but for any air quality planning exercise that a regulatory agency engages with. 

Read more