Maria Val Martin

Quantitative studies of wildfire smoke injection heights with the Terra Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer

The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) is in its ninth year of operation aboard NASAs Terra satellite. MISR acquires imagery at nine view angles between 70.5° forward and backward of nadir. Stereoscopic image matching of red band data at 275-m horizontal spatial resolution provides measurements of aerosol plume heights in the vicinity and downwind of wildfires. We are supplementing MISRs standard stereo product with more detailed, higher vertical spatial resolution stereo retrievals over individual smoke plumes, using the MISR INteractive eXplorer (MINX) analysis tool. To limit the amount of data that must be processed, MODIS (Moderate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) thermal anomaly data are used to identify fire locations. Data over North America are being analyzed to generate a climatology of smoke injection heights and to derive a general parameterization for the injection heights that can be used within non-plume-resolving chemical transport models. In 2002, we find that up to about 30% of fire plumes over North America reached the free troposphere. Sufficiently buoyant plumes tend to become trapped near stratified stable layers within the atmospheric vertical profile, supporting a result first obtained on a more limited set of MISR data [1]. Data from other years are being processed to further establish the robustness of these conclusions.

Richard Honrath (1961–2009)

Richard Honrath, a highly appreciated colleague, productive and energetic atmospheric scientist, and caring educator, died in a kayaking accident on 17 April 2009. Richard received his B.S. in 1984 from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena; his M.S. in 1985 from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pa.; and his Ph.D. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1992. He became involved in Arctic research at Carnegie Mellon, where his work focused on sulfur and nitrogen in Greenland snow. Upon moving to Alaska in 1987, Richard focused on measurements of atmospheric nitrogen oxides in the Arctic. For this work, he built a high-sensitivity chemiluminescence analyzer, one of just a handful of such instruments in the world at the time.