Investigating Fast-Evolving Smoke Absorption Properties Using the Critical Reflectance Method

Smoke especially from large scale wildfires can alter Earth’s radiation budget regionally and globally, especially after being injected into the stratosphere, causing long term climate impacts. The absorption properties of the smoke are extremely important in terms of quantifying the magnitude of smoke radiative effects. However, with fast-evolving smoke properties and ever-changing emissions, quantifying smoke properties near their fire sources has never been done systematically before. This is due to the extremely hash observing conditions restricting field measurements, leaving few experimental data points. Polar orbiting satellites avoid those harsh on-the-ground conditions and can retrieve smoke properties at specific wavelength, although with relatively large uncertainties over complicated lower boundary conditions. But these satellites can provide only twice a day data coverage over the scene. With the launch of the GOES-R series in geosynchronous orbit, we can now monitor smoke properties as they change every 10 minutes. We adapt critical reflectance concepts to data from the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI-east/west) on board the GOES satellites. This technique is designed to retrieve aerosol absorption over heterogenous surfaces and can provide absorption properties at high temporal resolution at each individual wavelength. For the first time, temporal evolution of the smoke close to emission sources are revealed.