GEOG Associate Research Professor Dong (Tony) Chen, Professor and Department Chair Tatiana Loboda, PhD Candidate Allison Bredder, in collaboration with researchers from NOAA and the Michigan Technological University, published a paper titled “Simulating spatio-temporal dynamics of surface PM2.5 emitted from Alaskan wildfires” in Science of The Total Environment (IF: 10.754).

Wildfire is a common natural disturbance agent in the high northern latitude regions. During the recent decades, with the substantial Arctic warming, they have become increasingly intensive. A likely example would be this year’s wildfires in Canada. Even though it’s still July (with more than two months to go in a typical fire season), 2023 is already the worst fire year (in terms of burned area) in Canada’s recorded history. Up until recently, few research has focused on wildfires’ impact on air quality. Funded by NASA’s ABoVE program, our team has been studying how boreal wildfires affect regional and hemispherical air quality, with this paper being one of the outputs. Based on Alaska, through estimating wildfire emissions and smoke transportation, we reconstructed wildfire-induced daily PM2.5 concentration for Alaska over the fire seasons of 2001-2015. Through comparing the fire-induced PM2.5 concentrations and the ground-recorded PM2.5 data, we showed that wildfire is the dominant driver of PM2.5 dynamics during the fire seasons in Alaska. The produced datasets have huge impacts for conducting epidemiological analyses (linking wildfire activities with certain cardiovascular and respiratory diseases) in areas like Alaska where ground-based air quality monitoring is rare.

Full text can be found here: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1hSHTB8ccybbx