Utilizing climate information for smoke dispersion planning

A new Air Quality Impacts Planning Tool (AQUIPT) utilizes historical climate information to determine likely smoke impacts from planned burns. Users can submit burn locations and recieve statistical summaries of where the smoke from such a fire would have gone in the past, divided by month or season. AQUIPT relies on the BlueSky smoke modeling framework that combines emissions and fuel loading models with the CALPUFF dispersion model. AQUIPT combines this with nearly 30 years of weather data across the coterminous U.S. that has been downscaled to 36km from the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis product using the MM5 mesoscale meteorological model. By running the same burn for each day in the 30 year period, statistical impact maps for PM2.5 are generated including average and max concentrations and percent time impacted.

The AQUIPT tool provides a climatology of dispersion. It allows studies of interannual variability in dispersion patterns. Additionally, by utilizing BACKPUFF, a reverse time version of CALPUFF, the climatologically likely source areas of impacts to various sensitive receptors can be determined. Results are shown for selected Class 1 areas.