Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Aerosol Mass And Optical Properties, Smoke Influence On O3, And High No3 Production Rates In A Western U.S. City Impacted By Wildfires, Vanessa Selimovic, Robert J. Yokelson, Gavin R. Mcmeeking, Sarah Coefield

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications

Evaluating our understanding of smoke from wild and prescribed fires can benefit from downwind measurements that include inert tracers to test production and transport and reactive species to test chemical mechanisms. We characterized smoke from fires in coniferous forest fuels for >1,000 hr over two summers (2017 and 2018) at our Missoula, Montana, surface station and found a narrow range for key properties. ΔPM2.5/ΔCO was 0.1070 ± 0.0278 (g/g) or about half the age-independent ratios obtained at free troposphere elevations (0.2348 ± 0.0326). The average absorption Ångström exponent across both years was 1.84 ± 0.18, or about half the values …