Presented to Somewhere over the Rainbow.pdf

Accounting for Fire Injection Height in Climate Studies Charlie Zender Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine Contributions from: New Student (UCI) Presented to: Somewhere over the Rainbow (Web: /smn/smn fr.pdf) 1. Fire Energetics 1. Combusting a mass of fuelM liberates a total energy E in the form of radiationR, sensible heat (enthalpy)H , latent heatL, ground storageG, and chemical transformation C: E = Total energy liberated by combustion E = R +H + L +G + C (1) Controlled experiments show that Fire Radiative Energy R is proportional to total combustion R ∝ E. Field estimates of H range from 1474Wm?2 (vegetation fires in Brazil), 3255Wm?2 (cerrado and gallery forest burning in Brazil), 7205Wm?2 (burning slashed tropical forest in Brazil), and 28000Wm?2 (rainforest clearing in Brazil) (Freitas et al., 2006b). 2. Fire Radiative Power Satellites retrievals use a Fire Thermal Anomaly (FTA) method to determine the (broadband) Fire Radiative Power (FRP): FRP [Wm?2] = dR dt (2) The MODIS FTA Giglio et al. (2003), e.g., inverts the difference between observed mid-infrared fire-radiance I+f (3.96μm) and fire-free, cloud-free radiance I+nf(3.96μm): FRP ∝ I+f (3.96μm)? I+nf(3.96μm) (3) I+nf(3.96μm) can be estimated from nearby fire-free, cloud-free pixels. MODIS determines the absolute FRP using Kaufman et al. (1998) FRP [MW] = C × [T 8B,f(3.96μm)? T 8B,nf(3.96μm)]× A [km2] (4) where C ≡ 4.34× 10?19 MWK?8 km?2 (5) The European geostationary satellite SEVERI FTA/FRP algorithm is simi- lar. 3. Fire Injection Modules A Fire Injection Module (FIM) introduces physical perturbations of fires into a model for assessing the the fire-forcing of the environment. Perturba- tions which could be injected include 1. Radiant energy 2. Sensible heat 3. Ground heat 4. Water vapor 5. non-H2O Gases (CO, NOx, etc.) 6. Black Carbon (BC) 7. Organics (OC) The current CCSM FIM in SNICAR injects aerosols (only) using GFED2 interpolated monthly 1? × 1? emissions from 19