David Peterson

United States Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, CA

Intense heating by wildfires can generate deep, smoke-infused thunderstorms, known as pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb), which can release a large quantity of smoke particles above jet aircraft cruising altitudes. Injections of pyroCb smoke into the lower stratosphere have gained increasing attention over the past 15 years due to the rapid proliferation of...

The first observationally based conceptual model for intense pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) development is described by applying reanalyzed meteorological model output to an inventory of 26 intense pyroCb events from June to August 2013 and a control inventory of intense fire activity without pyroCb. Results are based on 88 intense wildfires observed wi...

The 2013 Rim Fire, which burned over 104,000 ha, was one of the most severe fire events in California’s history, in terms of its rapid growth, intensity, overall size, and persistent smoke plume. At least two large pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) events were observed, allowing smoke particles to extend through the upper troposphere over a large portion o...

[1] All chemical transport models require an estimation of the vertical distribution of smoke particles near the source. This study quantitatively examines the strengths and weaknesses of several fire products for characterizing plume buoyancy and injection heights in the North American boreal forest during 2004-2005. Observations from the Multi-an...

Developed as a quantitative measurement of fire intensity, fire radiative power (FRP) and the potential applications to smoke plume injection heights, are currently limited by the pixel resolution of a satellite sensor. As a result, this study, the first in a two-part series, develops a new sub-pixel-based calculation of fire radiative power (FRPf)...

Increasing impacts of wildfires on Western US air quality highlights the need for forecasts of smoke emissions based on dynamic modeled wildfires. This work utilizes knowledge of weather, fuels, topography, and firefighting, combined with machine learning and other statistical methods, to generate 1‐ and 2‐day forecasts of fire radiative energy (FR...

Convective dynamics in a supercell thunderstorm, a volcanic eruption, and two pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) events are compared by computing cloud‐top divergence (CTD) with an optical flow technique called Deepflow. Visible 0.64‐μm imagery sequences from Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES)‐R series Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) a...

The discovery of smoke‐induced dynamical anomalies in the stratosphere associated with the 2019/2020 Australian New Year pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) super outbreak initiated a new field of study involving aerosol/weather anomalies. This paper documents the dynamical anomalies associated with the February 2009 Australian Black Saturday pyroCb outbreak...

This study addresses two key uncertainties in the Fire Radiative Power (FRP) retrieval, essential for global top-down fire emission inventories. First, it proposes a novel FRP retrieval method by incorporating the ~8.6 μm channel alongside ~4 μm using Monte Carlo simulation. This inclusion significantly improves the accuracy of FRP retrieval, espec...

Predicting the evolution of burned area, smoke emissions, and energy release from wildfires is crucial to air quality forecasting and emergency response planning yet has long posed a significant scientific challenge. Here we compare predictions of burned area and fire radiative power from the coupled weather/fire‐spread model WRF‐Fire (Weather and...

Background Accurately estimating burned area from satellites is key to improving biomass burning emission models, studying fire evolution and assessing environmental impacts. Previous studies have found that current methods for estimating burned area of fires from satellite active-fire data do not always provide an accurate estimate. Aims and metho...

Pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) are wildfire-generated convective clouds that can inject smoke directly into the stratosphere. PyroCb have been tracked for years, yet their apparent rarity and episodic nature lead to highly uncertain climate impacts. In situ measurements of pyroCb smoke reveal its distinctive and exceptionally stable aerosol properties a...

The NOAA/NASA Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX‐AQ) experiment was a multi‐agency, inter‐disciplinary research effort to: (a) obtain detailed measurements of trace gas and aerosol emissions from wildfires and prescribed fires using aircraft, satellites and ground‐based instruments, (b) make extensive suborbita...

High-intensity wildland fires can produce extreme flaming and smoke emissions that develop into a fire-cloud chimney, reaching into the upper troposphere or lower stratosphere. Termed pyrocumulonimbus, these storms are both conventional and counterintuitive. They have been observed to produce lightning, hail, downdraft wind hazards, and tornadoes a...

This study develops a new thin cirrus detection algorithm applicable to over-land scenes. The methodology builds from a previously developed over-water algorithm (McHardy et al. 2021), which makes use of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite 16 (GOES-16) Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) channel 4 radiance (1.378 μm “cirrus” band). Cal...

Stratospheric injections of carbonaceous aerosols and combustion gases by extreme wildfires have become increasingly common. Recent “megafires,” particularly large and intense fires, delivered particulate burdens to the lower stratosphere comparable to those of moderate volcanic eruptions. The 2017 Canadian megafire generated four large Pyrocumulon...

The 2019 Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) field experiment obtained a diverse set of in-situ and remotely-sensed measurements before and during a pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) event over the Williams Flats fire in Washington State. This unique dataset confirms that pyroCb activity is an efficient vertical smo...

Wildfires are a substantial but poorly quantified source of tropospheric ozone (O₃). Here, to investigate the highly variable O₃ chemistry in wildfire plumes, we exploit the in situ chemical characterization of western wildfires during the FIREX-AQ flight campaign and show that O₃ production can be predicted as a function of experimentally constrai...

The Black Summer fire season of 2019–2020 in southeastern Australia contributed to an intense ‘super outbreak’ of fire-induced and smoke-infused thunderstorms, known as pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb). More than half of the 38 observed pyroCbs injected smoke particles directly into the stratosphere, producing two of the three largest smoke plumes observe...

Plain Language Summary Wildfire‐generated thunderstorms, which in ways resemble explosive volcanic eruptions, can dot the landscape as an individual blowup or a cluster over a complex of fires. A technical term for these storm clouds is “pyrocumulonimbus” (“pyroCb” for short). The Pacific Northwest Event (PNE) pyroCbs in 2017 gained wide attention....

We describe a quantitative evaluation of maritime transparent cirrus cloud detection, which is based on Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite – 16 (GOES-16) and developed with collocated Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) profiling. The detection algorithm is developed using one month of collocated GOES-16 Advance...

Naturally occurring ozone‐rich stratosphere‐to‐troposphere transport (STT) intrusions and biomass burning (BB) plumes reaching the surface can contribute to exceedances of the U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standards for ground‐level ozone (70 ppbv implemented in 2015). Additionally, fires can inject significant pollution into the free troposphe...

The Korea-United States Air Quality Study (KORUS-AQ) took place in spring 2016 to better understand air pollution in Korea. In support of KORUS-AQ, 2554 whole air samples (WAS) were collected aboard the NASA DC-8 research aircraft and analyzed for 82 C₁–C₁₀ volatile organic compounds (VOCs) using multi-column gas chromatography. Together with fast-...

The Korea – United States Air Quality Study (May – June 2016) deployed instrumented aircraft and ground-based measurements to elucidate causes of poor air quality related to high ozone and aerosol concentrations in South Korea. This work synthesizes data pertaining to aerosols (specifically, particulate matter with aerodynamic diameters

Sudden wind direction and speed shifts from outflow boundaries (OFBs) associated with deep convection significantly affect weather in the lower troposphere. Specific OFB impacts include rapid variation in wildfire spread rate and direction, the formation of convection, aviation hazards, and degradation of visibility and air quality due to mineral d...

This investigation examines aerosol dynamics during major fine mode aerosol transboundary pollution events in South Korea primarily during the KORUS-AQ campaign from May 1 – June 10, 2016, particularly when cloud fraction was high and/or fog was present to quantify the change in aerosol characteristics due to near-cloud or fog interaction. We analy...

The air quality of South Korea was the focus of the NASA/NIER KORean -United States Air Quality (KORUS-AQ) mission of 2016. KORUS-AQ was planned for the period after the spring peak in outbreaks of Asian dust. Regardless of this strategic planning, quantifiable dust was still observed via instrumentation on the NASA DC-8 in early May. A novel analy...

In an environment with many local, remote, persistent, and episodic sources of pollution, meteorology is the primary factor that drives periods of unhealthy air quality and reduced visibility. The 2016 Korea-United States Air Quality (KORUS-AQ) field study provides a unique opportunity to examine the impact of meteorology on the relative influence...

The literature—spanning several recent decades—describes numerous attempts to characterize the efficacy of cumulonimbus “Cb” convection as a pollutant pathway connecting the planetary BL to the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS). The relatively new discovery of wildfires triggering deep convection and Cb formation, referred to as pyroc...

Plain Language Summary Extreme fire events can produce towering smoke plumes, which can result in the injection of smoke aerosols into the lower stratosphere (∼10 km above the surface in the midlatitudes). These stratospheric aerosols are significant because they stay in the atmosphere longer than those closer to the surface. In this study, we mode...

Up in smoke Extensive and intense wildfires in the Pacific Northwest of the United States in 2017 injected large quantities of smoke into the stratosphere. Yu et al. used satellite observations and modeling to characterize the history and chemistry of that smoke. The smoke rose to altitudes between 12 and 23 kilometers within 2 months owing to sola...

Sudden wind direction and speed shifts from outflow boundaries (OFBs) associated with deep convection significantly affect weather in the lower troposphere. Specific OFB impacts include rapid variation in wildfire spread rate and direction, the formation of convection, aviation hazards, and degradation of visibility and air quality due to mineral d...

We present a direct broadcast (DB) rapid response burned area mapping algorithm for Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) data that combines products driven by the spectral signal of fire-affected areas from both emissive and reflective spectral bands. The algorithm processes VIIRS infrared M-bands (750 m) using spectral ratios of the t...

East Asia is the strongest global source region for anthropogenic black carbon (BC), the most important light‐absorbing aerosol contributing to direct radiative climate forcing. To provide extended observational constraints on regional BC distributions and impacts, in situ measurements of BC were obtained with a single particle soot photometer duri...

This study analyzes a pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) that formed near Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada on 5 August 2014 using multiple satellite- and ground-based data sets, meteorological reanalysis, and a cloud-resolving model. Passive and active polar-orbiting instruments and geostationary imagery detail the intense updraft col...

Intense wildfires occasionally generate fire-triggered storms, known as pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb), that can inject smoke particles and trace gases into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS). This study develops the first pyroCb detection algorithm using three infrared (IR) channels from the imager on board GOES-West (GOES-15). The alg...

We couple airborne, ground-based, and satellite observations; conduct regional simulations; and develop and apply an inversion technique to constrain hourly smoke emissions from the Rim Fire, the third largest observed in California, USA. Emissions constrained with multiplatform data show notable nocturnal enhancements (sometimes over a factor of 2...

Unlike previous spaceborne Earth observing sensors, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) employs onboard sample aggregation to reduce downlink bandwidth requirements and preserve spatial resolution across the scan. To examine the potentially deleterious impacts of onboard sample aggregation when encountering detector saturation, ne...

Characterising radiation from wildland fires is an important focus of fire science because radiation relates directly to the combustion process and can be measured across a wide range of spatial extents and resolutions. As part of a more comprehensive set of measurements collected during the 2012 Prescribed Fire Combustion and Atmospheric Dynamics...

A statistical model, based on numerical weather prediction (NWP), is developed to predict the subsequent day's satellite observations of fire activity in the North American boreal forest during the fire season (24-h forecast). In conjunction with the six components of the Canadian Forest Fire Danger Rating System and other NWP outputs, fire data fr...

Fire radiative power (FRP) over a pixel area has been highlighted as a valuable parameter for quantitatively deriving smoke emissions. However, smoke plume rise forecasts and characterizations of fire intensity require additional information, including the FRP over the fire area (FRPf) and per fire area (or fire radiative flux), both of which can b...

Developed as a quantitative measurement of fire intensity, fire radiative power (FRP) and the potential applications to smoke plume injection heights, are currently limited by the pixel resolution of a satellite sensor. As a result, this study, the first in a two-part series, develops a new sub-pixel-based calculation of fire radiative power (FRPf)...

Satellites have been used to provide information on fire activity for wildfire response and air quality applications for many years. While important refinements have been made to algorithmic processing of single satellite scenes for fire detection, most near-real-time (NRT) applications still use fire products in their simplest form-a list of locat...

In order to meet the emerging need for better estimates of biomass burning emissions in air quality and climate models, a statistical model is developed to characterize the effect of a given set of meteorological conditions on the following day's fire activity, including ignition and spread potential. Preliminary tests are conducted within several...

Detailed validations of retrieved sub-pixel fire area fractions from satellite observations are now possible in the western United States via the multispectral, high-resolution data (3-50 meters) obtained from the Autonomous Modular Sensor (AMS), flown aboard an Unmanned Airborne Vehicle (UAV). Using this validation tool, the potential for obtainin...

The effects of lightning and other meteorological factors on wildfire activity in the North American boreal forest are statistically analyzed during the fire seasons of 2000–2006 through an integration of the following data sets: the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) level 2 fire products, the 3-hourly 32-km gridded meteorologic...

The effects of lightning and other meteorological factors on wildfire activity in the North American boreal forest are statistically analyzed during the fire seasons of 2000–2006 through an integration of the following data sets: the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) level 2 fire products, the 3-hourly 32-km gridded meteorologic...

Meteorological impacts on the variability of wildfires in boreal North America including Alaska and Canada are investigated using six years of the MODIS fire counts, the meteorological data from North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR), and the lightning data collected by the Canadian Lightning Detection Network (CLDN) and the Bureau of Land Manag...

Meteorological impacts on the interannual variability of wildfires in North America including Alaska are investigated using six years of the MODIS fire and Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) products, the meteorological data from North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR), and the lightning data collected by the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN)....