| Description |
Wildfires and wind-blown dust events are expected to increase through the end of the 21st century as a result of warmer temperatures and increasing aridity, which is being driven by climate change. There is a significant need to develop air quality modeling frameworks that can simulate the impacts of fires and dust in the future. Modeling wildfire and dust events is often difficult as both vary significantly in time and space, often requiring sophisticated high-resolution atmospheric transport models that can resolve fine-scale processes. A Lagrangian-based modeling framework was initially developed for Salt Lake City during the summers of 2007 and 2012 to evaluate model performance during two wildfire seasons. The model was able to replicate the timing of enhanced PM2.5 concentrations from wildfires; however, an underestimation was observed, which was attributed to the failure to include a wildfire plume rise parameterization. Additional work was carried out to determine the optimal configuration needed to accurately resolve the wildfire plume rise and the downwind smoke transport for a prescribed burn at Eglin Air Force Base, FL. From this analysis, recommendations were provided for the model configuration needed to accurately simulate the downwind transport of smoke. A separate modeling framework was developed for wind-blown dust, which was applied to the Wasatch Front during the spring of 2010. Final results from this study found that dust model simulations were able to successfully replicate two wind- blown dust episodes on 30 March and 27-28 April 2010. However, significant updates were needed for soil classifications within the model in order to account for dust production across dry lake beds. Simulations were then carried out to estimate the impacts of a desiccating Great Salt Lake on air quality along the Wasatch Front. From these simulations, it was determined that concentrations of harmful particulates increased by a factor of 2 across the Wasatch Front as a result of decreased Great Salt Lake water levels. |
