Ground solar absorption observations of total column CO, CO ₂, CH ₄, and aerosol optical depth from California's Sequoia Lightning Complex Fire: emission factors and modified combustion efficiency at regional scales

With global wildfires becoming more widespread and severe, tracking their emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants is becoming increasingly important. Wildfire emissions have primarily been characterized by in situ laboratory and field observations at fine scales. While this approach captures the mechanisms relating emissions to combustion phase and fuel properties, their evaluation on regional-scale plumes has been limited. In this study, we report remote observations of total column trace gases and aerosols during the 2020 wildfire season from smoke plumes in the Sierra Nevada of California with an EM27/SUN solar Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer. We derive total column aerosol optical depth (AOD), emission factors (EFs) and modified combustion efficiency (MCE) for these fires and evaluate relationships between them, based on combustion phase at regional scales. We demonstrate that the EM27/SUN effectively detects changes in CO, COinline-formula₂, and CHinline-formula₄ in the atmospheric column at inline-formula∼10 km horizontal scales that are attributed to wildfire emissions. These observations are used to derive total column EFinline-formula_CO of inline-formula120.5±12.2 and EFinline-formula $M8inlinescrollmathml{}_{chem{\mathrm{normal\; CH}}_{\mathrm{normal\; 4}}}$ 17pt10ptsvg-formulamathimg32fcb9b06949ba990243bb7a696d298c acp-23-4521-2023-ie00001.svg17pt10ptacp-23-4521-2023-ie00001.png of inline-formula4.3±0.8 for a regional smoke plume event in mixed combustion phases. These values are consistent with in situ relationships measured in similar temperate coniferous forest wildfires. FTIR-derived AOD was compared to a nearby AERONET (AErosol RObotic NETwork) station and observed ratios of Xinline-formula_CO to AOD were consistent with those previously observed from satellites. We also show that co-located Xinline-formula_CO observations from the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) satellite-based instrument are inline-formula9.7±1.3 % higher than our EM27/SUN observations during the wildfire period. Finally, we put wildfire CHinline-formula₄ emissions in context of the California state CHinline-formula₄ budget and estimate that inline-formula213.7±49.8 Gg CHinline-formula₄ were emitted by large wildfires in California during 2020, about 13.7 % of the total state CHinline-formula₄ emissions in 2020. Our work demonstrates a novel application of the ground-based EM27/SUN solar spectrometers in wildfire monitoring by integrating regional-scale measurements of trace gases and aerosols from smoke plumes.