Abstract:Carbon monoxide (CO) is a key gas in the lower atmosphere. Its primary sources are combustion by automobile engines and burning of forests and grassland. It was thought that CO levels were highest over urban centers and higher on the northern hemisphere as compared to the southern one. However, using airborne measurements, the highest CO levels were recorded over tropical rain forests and burning Savannah. In 1993, two shuttle missions were allocated to estimate CO on a global scale. The first mission of measurement of air pollution from satellites (MAPS) was in April with a second mission planned for the Fall. In order to validate the instrument data, sixteen countries participated in collecting ground samples simultaneously with the shuttle flight experimentation process. Since CO resides only for about 3 months in the atmosphere, temporal aspects of the global carbon monoxide distribution can be analyzed. Forest or grassland fires provide an important source of CO in the atmosphere. Therefore, as part of this research effort, a controlled experiment involving the burning of several hundred ha of forest in northern Canada was carried out during the time of the October shuttle flight. The composition and age distribution of the forest is relatively well known, thus the CO levels as measured by MAPS can be correlated with the biomass involved in the fire. Thermal infrared images were taken by helicopter, high altitude aircraft and the space shuttle. The fire was also monitored by ground instruments measuring wind speed, wind direction and temperature at various heights. The result was a multi-resolution datasets that are to be analyzed in future. Researcher:
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