Wildfires May Have Bigger Role in Global Warming, Study Says
Researchers at the Department of Energy facility normally chase fires throughout the western U.S., to measure their atmospheric effects. But in 2011, they took advantage of a conflagration that came to their doorstep - the Las Conchas fire that burned more than 150,000 acres and briefly caused the evacuation of the sprawling facility in the New Mexico desert.After the brief evacuation ended, Dubey’s team set up monitoring devices while the fire continued to rage across the desert scrubland. Their analysis, which included painstaking counting and classification of thousands of particles, revealed components that had not been considered in climate models, most of which have suggested that cooling and warming effects of two kinds of aerosols tended to cancel each other out.
The Los Alamos team identified tar balls - spherical, carbon-based particles - that are 10 times more prevalent than soot particles, and can boost the heating effect of wildfire emissions, according to the study, published last week in the journal Nature Communications.
“We provided the data that shows that current estimates, which are close to zero or show a very slight warming, are incorrect and the warming will be higher,” Dubey said. “We are confident this will change the results and show that fire emissions will have a tendency to warm.”
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