Climate Adaptation Science Investigators (CASI)
Fires and Air Quality Workgroup
Fires and Air Quality Total burned area in the western U.S. has increased since the 1980s, as have the frequency of large fires and smoke-related deterioration in air quality over the Northwest (Doerr et al. 2016, McClure et al. 2018). Over forested regions, the burned area increase is partly explained by an earlier spring and drier fuels associated with anthropogenic warming (Touma et al. 2021). This increase in burned area has led to related decreases in the air quality at several NASA facilities.
The CASI Fires and Air Quality Workgroup has developed a product that raises awareness of air quality changes already happening at NASA Centers. This has helped to characterize the expected need to accommodate future degradation of air quality due to fires, specifically to help inform maintenance and upkeep of ventilation systems at the Centers.
Using information from the recent past, this workgroup first explored how the current air quality conditions have already begun to change due to increases in wildfires. This workgroup looked for relationships between these changes to air quality and the environmental conditions that lead to increases in wildfire smoke, and then applied climate predictions to explore how air quality may change in coming decades at NASA Centers affected directly by smoke from western wildfires.
Projections
CASI Fires and Air Quality Workgroup projections for NASA Centers and their surrounding regions may be viewed on the NASA Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources (POWER) website.
Contact
The points of contact for this workgroup are Laura Iraci (laura.t.iraci@nasa.gov) and Elizabeth Wiggins (elizabeth.b.wiggins@nasa.gov).
References
Doerr, S.H., and C. Santín, 2016: Global trends in wildfire and its impacts: Perceptions versus realities in a changing world. Phil. Trans. Royal Soc. B, 371, no. 1696, doi:10.1098/rstb.2015.0345.
McCLure, C.D., and D.A. Jaffe, 2018: US particulate matter air quality improves except in wildfire-prone areas. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci., 115, no. 31, 7901-7906, doi:10.1073/pnas.1804353115.
Touma, D., S. Stevenson, F. Lehner, and S. Coats, 2021: Human-driven greenhouse gas and aerosol emissions cause distinct regional impacts on extreme fire weather. Nat. Commun., 12, 212, doi:doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20570-w.
