Evidence for the impact of fire activity on daily variations of IASI mid-tropospheric CO 2 anomalies at 8–11 km over South America: a pyroconvective fingerprint

Abstract

Biomass burning is a major, highly variable source of atmospheric CO 2 , but its impact on the free troposphere remains difficult to quantify because of uncertainties in injection heights and transport. In the tropics, intense fires can trigger pyroconvective plumes that loft combustion products to the mid- and upper troposphere. However, most fire emission inventories and global CO 2 inversions still assume simplified vertical distributions of CO 2 emitted by fires. Weighted columns of CO 2 retrieved from remote sensing instruments that are sensitive to such high-altitude enhancements can inform of such dynamics. Here we combine mid-tropospheric CO 2 (MT-CO 2 ) retrievals from three IASI instruments with GOES-16 observations of Fire Radiative Energy (FRE) to link daily MT-CO 2 anomalies observed by IASI at 8–11 km altitude to South American fire activity during the 2020 burning season, while accounting for long-range horizontal transport of anomalies. From August–October 2020, about 66 % of the detected anomalies originate from long-range or unknown sources and are discarded. For the remaining anomalies attributed to local fires, 72 h back trajectories do intersect with at least one active fire detection for 75 % of them. Their daily sum co-varies strongly with FRE, with the ratio between the two depending on the dominant horizontal transport regime. A comparison with the CAMS inversion-optimised CO 2 product (v23r1), sampled with the IASI vertical weighting, shows that the model fails to reproduce both the amplitude and structure of the observed anomalies. Overall, our results demonstrate that IASI MT-CO 2 anomalies carry an observational fingerprint of tropical fire activity.