"Burning issues: managing prescribed fire and air quality impacts in the eastern United States"
Wednesday, Sep 23, 2026
- Colloquium - 499 DSL Seminar Room
- 03:30 to 04:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Abstract:
Fires are widespread and frequent across the eastern United States, but their extent and impacts have been underestimated due to the difficulty of detecting small, short-duration fires from satellites. We use improved fire detections from geostationary satellite instruments (Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on GOES) and a new compilation of locally specific emission factors to develop a new biomass burning inventory for the eastern U.S. Using an atmospheric chemistry model to simulate air quality, we show that our new inventory better fits aerosol measurements than most previous inventories. The results support fire emissions that are higher than most previous estimates with air quality impacts 2-4 times larger than previous assessments. We discuss the implications for health and prescribed fire management.
| File | Description | File size |
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 SEFire.jpg | Research Image | 748 kB |
