Identification

Title

Fate of pollution emitted during the 2015 Indonesian fire season

Abstract

The El Niño‐driven fire season in Indonesia in September–October 2015 produced the largest fire emissions on record since NASA's EOS satellites started making observations of tropospheric pollutants from space. In this study, measurements of carbon monoxide (CO) from the Measurement of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) on Terra and the Microwave Limb Sounder are used to characterize the anomalously high CO emitted during the 2015 Indonesian fire season transported into the tropical upper troposphere and stratosphere. The satellite measurements indicate that CO emitted from wildfires was transported into the upper troposphere with time lags up to ∼2 months and continued to be transported into the stratosphere, which resulted in higher concentrations of CO extending up to ∼20 hPa by the end of 2016. Hydrogen cyanide (HCN) measured by the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment Fourier Transform Spectrometer (ACE‐FTS) confirms that anomalously high HCN emitted from the same wildfires was also transported into the tropical stratosphere and persisted throughout 2017. Simulations of CO from the Community Atmosphere Model with Chemistry (CAM‐chem) show a significant increase in CO concentrations in the troposphere in October 2015. However, comparisons between CAM‐chem and MOPITT CO suggest that the model underestimates the amount of CO even with doubled emissions of CO in October 2015. Both the satellite measurements and the model simulations show that the pollution emitted from the wildfires over Indonesia was transported to and persisted in the tropical stratosphere much longer than the previous El‐Niño driven fire events due to unprecedented amount of the fire emissions.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d71g0qpx

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2021-05-16T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact