Leibniz MMS Days 2018 - Abstract
Wagner, Robert
Wildfires like biomass burning are a very common phenomenon in semi-arid regions nearly all over the world. Investigations of smoke plume originating from wildfires found significant fractions of mineral dust within these plumes - raised by strong turbulent winds related to the fire. Since wildfires are not considered so far as a source of mineral dust in aerosol models, a better understanding of the process is required. Since the involved processes responsible for fire-driven dust emissions acting on small scales, the All Scale Atmospheric Model (ASAM) was deployed as a high-resolved Large-Eddy-Simulation (LES) model in order to investigate the impacts of fires on the near-surface wind pattern that drive fire-associated dust emissions. By means of case studies the influence of different fire properties (fire intensity, size, and shape) and different atmospheric conditions on the strength and extent of fire-related winds and finally their relevance for dust emissions was investigated.