Assessment and Calculations of Plume Rise for Forest Fires during Texas Air Quality Study period'

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Assessment and Calculations of Plume Rise for
Forest Fires during Texas Air Quality Study
period.

• Uarporn Nopmongcol
• Dept. of Chemical Engineering
• The University of Texas
• Austin, Texas

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adfd
Wild fires

• Fires consumed vegetation on 1.6 and 1.7 million
  acres of lands in 1996 and 1997, respectively
• Contribute PM, CO, and ozone precursors to
  atmosphere
• Emission Inventory for Texas Air Quality Study
  (TexAQS) August 1st- September 30th in 200

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Why do we care plume rise??

• Vertical displacement before dispersion process
• not stack
• area sources
• evaluate 1 out of 6 models and integrate results
  into CAMx

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CAMx
Eulerian photochemical dispersion model that
allows for integrated assessment of gaseous and
particulate air pollution
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Goals

• Incorporate grid information to fire locations
  using ArcGIS
• Extracting meteorological data from
• CAMx MM5
• Visual Basic Programming of Fire plume
  calculation 

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Fire Plume Model

• Brown, 1999 , U. of Illinois
• Atmospheric dispersion and air quality impacts
  from fires/smoke sources
• Plume rise (Final Rise) - Briggs two-thirds law

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Equations Fire Plume Model
Stable Condition Neutral Condition Unstable
Condition
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Methodology Input needed
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Emission Inventory

• Fire Characteristics
• Plume temperature 900-1600 K
• Heat release Acres burned Emission Inventory
  during Texaqs period by CEER

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Sample of fire events

• modeling episode between Aug 22nd- Sep 1st
• HG-BPA domain
• large fire gt 500 acres

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Build grid
ASCII Grid
Excel Ascii
Add heading

• spatial analysis
• convert
• raster to feature

Define projection
WOO HOO !!
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Sample of fire events
Using Arc GIS to assemble the data
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Methodology Input Obtaining

• Meteorological Data
• CAMx binary input files
• - U, T
• - Fortran Coding
• MM5 binary output files
• - Heat flux at surface, mixing height
• - Fortran Coding
• - VB v.6 Coding , Greenwich to std time

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Programming

• All Input data is in Microsoft Access
• VB v. 6 programming
• Results Both burning period and Temperature do
  not effect plume rise

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Results and Discussion
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Conclusion Future work

• Conclusion suggest low plume rise at night time
  and high peak during late afternoon.
• Further study on different models is necessary

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Acknowledgements

• Dr. David Maidment
• Dr. Richard Corsi
• Dr. Dave T. Allen , CEER
• Dr. Yosuke Kimura, CEER
• CEER crews Anil, Victoria, Matt

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Questions? Be my guest!