Measuring Atmospheric CO(2) Enhancements From the 2017 British Columbia Wildfires Using a Lidar

During the summer 2017 ASCENDS/ABoVE airborne science campaign, the NASA Goddard CO(2) Sounder lidar overflew smoke plumes from wildfires in the British Columbia, Canada. In the flight path over Vancouver Island on 8 August 2017, the column XCO(2) retrievals from the lidar measurements at flight altitudes around 9 km showed an average enhancement of 4 ppm from the wildfires. A comparison of these enhancements with those from the Goddard Global Chemistry Transport model suggested that the modeled CO(2) emissions from wildfires were underestimated by more than a factor of 2. A spiral‐down validation performed at Moses Lake airport, Washington showed a bias of 0.1 ppm relative to in situ measurements and a standard deviation of 1 ppm in lidar XCO(2) retrievals. The results show that future airborne campaigns and spaceborne missions with this type of lidar can improve estimates of CO(2) emissions from wildfires and estimates of carbon fluxes globally.