1169433 - Wildfire Impacts on Air Toxics in the Western US Under a Changing Climate

This extreme event challenge is exacerbated as climate conditions change, populations shift, infrastructure recovers and electricity demands relocate. We conducted a climate-chemistry study on the impacts of air toxics by wildfires in the western US. The study has shown that the wildfire-induced air pollutant concentration changes could be as high as 102 ppb for O3 and 259 μg/m3 for PM2.5 at a local scale in the western United States, under the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) climate scenario. Wildfires induced by climate change increasingly cause a rise in air pollution and a human health impact. Future projections of wildfire emissions show a rise in pollutant concentrations between 2050 - 2059. Air pollutants have many important effects, such as influencing Earth’s radiative balance, diminishing human quality of life and exacerbating human health conditions, injuring ecosystems, damaging buildings and monuments, interfering with food safety, accelerating animal extinctions, altering Earth’s atmospheric composition, and impacting deposition rates. In addition to O3 and PM2.5, air toxics such as formaldehyde (CH2O), methane (CH4), carbon monoxide (CO), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) also impose threats to environmental and human health and are not paid too much attention. Since CH2O, CH4, CO, and NO2 are projected to increase in the future over CONUS, it is essential to examine how wildfires would influence their concentrations. In this presentation, we will present the trends and correlations between wildfires and the concentrations of CH4, CO, CH2O, and NO2. Uncertainty of the projected pollutant concentrations will also be presented.