The Record-Breaking 2023 Canadian Wildfires: Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Fire Intensity, Fuel Consumption, and Fire Emissions

The ongoing Canadian wildfires have burned more than 15 million hectares since 1 May 2023 due to excessively dry conditions, consuming huge amount of fuel and emitting record-breaking greenhouse gases and aerosol emissions. The chocking fire smoke has blanketed Canada and the Midwestern and Eastern United States (U.S.) for weeks, with hundreds of millions population breathing heavily polluted air. To support the operational air quality forecast at the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS), we have developed a new hourly 3 km fire emission product – the Regional ABI and VIIRS based fire Emission (RAVE). The RAVE emissions are estimated by blending fire radiative power (FRP) observations from the high temporal-resolution GOES-R ABI (2 km every 10 minute) and the fine spatial-resolution VIIRS (375m) on the JPSS satellites. The RAVE product provides hourly FRP and emission mass of 11 species (CO2, CH4, CO, PM2.5, TPM, BC, OC, SO2, NOx, NH3, and VOCs) across North America (NA). The accuracy assessment of the RAVE product has been done over the U.S. and is undergoing over the high-latitude NA. Although the spatial patterns of fire activities in high latitudes are often reported, diurnal variations of fire intensity and fire emissions are seldom known due to the lack of high temporal observations. In this study we explore the spatial and diurnal variations of fire intensity and fire emissions in the 2023 Canadian fire season by analyzing the RAVE hourly FRP and emissions. Total emission mass and diurnal patterns of fire intensity and emissions will be presented by regions and individual large fires. Moreover, we also examine fuel consumption at 3 km in all individual fires. Fuel consumption is calculated using satellite-based burned area (e.g., MODIS/Landsat) and consumed dry biomass that is computed using the RAVE hourly FRP. As the high latitudes are experiencing accelerated warming, hourly fire emissions in this record-breaking fire season are expected to improve air quality forecast, and fuel consumption information is expected to be very meaningful to fuel management in terms of fire disaster mitigations.