Synergistic Observations of Wildfire Smoke Transport and Impact on Air Quality in New York City during the Summer 2018 LISTOS Campaign

Air pollution associated with wildfire smoke transport in summer poses serious public health concerns in the populated urban areas like New York City (NYC). In this study, we present a synergistic ground-based and aircraft lidar, in-situ and satellite observation to assess wildfire smoke transport, optical properties and potential impact on the air quality in the NYC urban and coastal area during the summer 2018 Long Island Sound Tropospheric Ozone Study (LISTOS). An episode of dense smoke transport and its mixing into planetary-boundary-layer (PBL) on August 15-17, 2018 were investigated. The satellite fires and smoke product, NOAA-HYSPLIT backward trajectory and HRRR-smoke model are used to verify the sources and transport paths from the northwest US/Canada to the northeast US. The smoke particles are discriminated from urban aerosols with the large lidar-ratio and depolarization ratio from the NASA airborne HSRL. Concurrent high-level ozone (O₃), carbon monoxide (CO) and black carbon (BC) are indicated in the elevated smoke layers. The wildfire plumes contribute as much as ~70% to the column aerosol optical depth whereas the ground PM_2.5, organic carbon (OC) and CO show coincident increase (e.g. PM_2.5 from 5 to ~30 μg/m³) along with hourly O₃ exceedance in the NYC region.