New fire emissions inventory available

This photo of a smoke cloud from the Bootleg wildfire in Oregon dates from July 17, 2021. Credit: inciweb.nwcg.gov

The Climate Program Office’s Atmospheric Chemistry, Carbon Cycle and Climate (AC4) Program supported a new fire emissions inventory, providing publicly available data on trace gases and aerosols from global fires for the years 2002 through 2021. The inventory is hosted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and was developed by a team of scientists including AC4-funded researchers Christine Wiedinmyer, Kelley Barsanti, and Annmarie Carlton.

This new product, published in Geoscientific Model Development is termed the Fire Inventory from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) version 2.5 (FINNv2.5), and builds on a version 1 framework with numerous improvements. Land area burned, total vegetation burned, and types of chemicals emitted are all better represented in this new version. Other major updates are that smaller fires are able to be included in emissions processing and multiple satellites are able to be used simultaneously for estimating emissions.