Measuring Atmospheric CO 2 Enhancements From the 2017 British Columbia Wildfires Using a Lidar.

During the summer 2017 ASCENDS/ABoVE airborne science campaign, the NASA Goddard CO 2 Sounder lidar overflew smoke plumes from wildfires in the British Columbia, Canada. In the flight path over Vancouver Island on 8 August 2017, the column XCO 2 retrievals from the lidar measurements at flight altitudes around 9 km showed an average enhancement of 4 ppm from the wildfires. A comparison of these enhancements with those from the Goddard Global Chemistry Transport model suggested that the modeled CO 2 emissions from wildfires were underestimated by more than a factor of 2. A spiral-down validation performed at Moses Lake airport, Washington showed a bias of 0.1 ppm relative to in situ measurements and a standard deviation of 1 ppm in lidar XCO 2 retrievals. The results show that future airborne campaigns and spaceborne missions with this type of lidar can improve estimates of CO 2 emissions from wildfires and estimates of carbon fluxes globally.