FEBRUARY 2006: Inventory of boreal fire emissions for North America in 2004: The importance of peat burning and pyro-convective injection

The summer of 2004 was one of the strongest fire seasons on record for North America due to persistent fires in Alaska and western Canada. We construct a daily process-based fire emission inventory for that season, including consideration of peat burning and high-altitude (buoyant) injection, and evaluate it in a global chemical transport model (the GEOS-Chem CTM) simulation of CO through comparison with MOPITT satellite and ICARTT aircraft observations. The inventory is constructed by combining daily area burned reports and MODIS fire hotspots with estimates of fuel consumption and emission factors based on ecosystem type. Using drainage and peat distribution maps for Alaska and Canada, we estimate that 17% of the reported 51 x 10⁶ ha burned in 2004 were located in peatlands.

The figure shows the total biomass burning emissions of CO for June-August 2004, separating the contribution from the burning of peat. Our total estimate of North American fire emissions during the summer of 2004 is 27 Tg CO, including 9 Tg from peat. Including peat burning in the GEOS-Chem simulation improves agreement with MOPITT observations. The long-range transport of fire plumes observed by MOPITT suggests that the largest fires injected a significant fraction of their emissions in the upper troposphere. A full description is given in Turquety et al. [2006].