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Jaffe Group

Category: Research

Wildfires and poor air quality—Is this the new normal?

When smoke gets in your eyes this summer, your thoughts are probably turning to wildfires. Wildfires are on nearly everyone’s mind these days in the Pacific Northwest because of the smoky haze and poor air quality that is blanketing our area. This August is similar to August 2017, and so you might wonder—why is this happening and is it going to continue? Those are the questions many reporters have been asking Dan Jaffe in the last few weeks.

A new paper by group members Crystal McClure and Dan Jaffe published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science addresses these questions. This research highlights the dramatic gains in air quality that have taken place in the last few decades around the country except in the Northwest. In this region, the 98th percentile of daily fine particulate matter (PM2.5), or in other words the seven worst air quality days each year, is getting worse. Around the US, there have been improvements in air quality from reduced power plant, industry, and automobile emissions, but in the Northwest, those reductions are outweighed by the emissions from wildfires. Learn more about this paper.

The indications are that the wildfire season will continue to get worse in the Northwest. Forest management practices and meteorological factors such as increased spring and summer temperatures, earlier snowmelt, and dryer forest conditions contribute to the current situation. “We want to be careful not to put it all on climate change, but climate change is clearly a contributing factor, and particularly in the size of these fires,” Dan Jaffe told E&E News. “A fire that used to become a small fire has now become a massive conflagration.” We will see more high fire years and, in general, longer fire seasons and bigger fires.

The increase in wildfires and smoky conditions causes adverse health effects. Wildfires are a major source of fine particulate matter, which is small enough to be inhaled deeply into the lungs. The health impacts of breathing smoke can be significant, especially for children, the elderly, and people with pulmonary, cardiovascular, and other chronic conditions.

To listen and watch interviews with Dan Jaffe about wildfires and air quality, visit:

To read more, see:

To see all news reports and articles about our research, see our In the News page.

Background ozone and implications for air quality management

In a new paper published in Elementa, Dan Jaffe and his coauthors look at background ozone in the US and how it influences whether states can meet air quality standards. Background ozone (O3) includes “contributions from natural and foreign sources of O3 that cannot be controlled by precursor emissions reductions solely within the US.” Understanding background O3 is necessary for air quality management overall and for states and municipalities to meet national air quality standards.

They examined over 100 published studies in order to assess what is the current knowledge about the distribution, trends, and sources of background ozone in the continental US. They found that “noncontrollable O3 sources, such as stratospheric intrusions or precursors from wildfires, can make significant contributions to O3 on some days, but it is challenging to quantify accurately these contributions.” In order to address this shortcoming, they recommend a more coordinated and focused approach to understanding background ozone in the US: improvements in the monitoring network, large-scale field experiments, more accurate and consistent chemical transport models, and more detailed observations of wildfires.

Read the paper here

Court decision on Oakland coal terminal

An article in the East Bay Express discusses the court decision on the coal export terminal that developers propose to build near the foot of the Bay Bridge in Oakland. Earlier this year, a U.S. District Court judge overturned Oakland’s ban on storing and handling coal at this planned marine terminal. Judge Chhabria found that there wasn’t enough evidence to support Oakland City Council’s assertion that “the proposed coal operations would pose a substantial danger to people in Oakland.” ESA, an environmental consulting firm, helped the city study the possible environmental impacts of shipping coal by train to the terminal. They found the scientific research on coal dust emissions from trains extremely lacking. In fact, they could find only one recent, peer-reviewed scientific study focusing on coal dust emissions from trains: the 2014 Jaffe Group paper “Diesel particulate matter and coal dust from trains in the Columbia River Gorge, Washington State, USA.”  Judge Chhabria agreed with the city that some level of coal dust pollution is likely but said that the city couldn’t show exactly how much and what the health and safety impacts would be. Scientific research on the effects of coal dust emissions on public health in urban areas is limited. Oakland is currently appealing the court’s decision.

Read the East Bay Express news article here

US particulate matter air quality improves except in wildfire-prone areas—See our new group paper!

A new paper authored by Crystal McClure and Dan Jaffe describes the increasing  particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution over the last few decades in the Northwest. This research, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analyzed PM2.5 data from rural monitoring (IMPROVE) sites across the contiguous US for 1988–2016. They found a decreasing trend  in PM2.5, and cleaner air, around the country except for in the Northwest, where there is a positive trend in PM2.5. This positive trend is associated with total carbon, a marker for wildfires.

The figure below shows trends in PM2.5 for 1988–2016 for the 98th quantile, that is, the seven highest days. In most of the Northwest (red and orange areas), these days are getting worse, while most of the country has improving air quality trends (purple, blue, and green areas).

Figure 1 in PNAS paper US particulate matter air quality improves except in wildfire-prone areas
The 98th Quantile Regression of PM2.5 trends. Observed PM trends for 1988–2016 (calculated using QR methods) from IMPROVE sites are shown by black dots with corresponding values in µg·m−3·y−1. Krige-interpolated values (calculated from observed data) are shown by the color ramp. Solid black lines with arrows (indicating direction) show the boundary where the Krige-interpolated PM2.5 trends within have a 90% probability of being positive or negative. Of the 157 sites, 92 show statistical significance (8 positive/84 negative).

Read the abstract on the PNAS website

This new research has been garnering a lot of press since its publication:

2018 begins with 3 new group papers

The Jaffe Group has kicked off 2018 with 3 new publications.

  • Xi Gong, et al., Ozone in China: Spatial distribution and leading meteorological factors controlling O3 in 16 Chinese cities. Gong and her coauthors examined ozone (O3) concentrations in 16 Chinese cities and developed a statistical model to estimate the maximum daily 8-hour (MDA8) O3 during 2014–2016. They found that the Generalized Additive Model (GAM) captured 43-90% of daily O3 variations. They also identified the leading meteorological factors that affect O3 for each city. Read the full paper here.
Average 8-hour MDA8 (ug/m3) ozone concentrations for 16 Chinese cities, 2014-2016
Average maximum daily 8-hour (MDA8, ug/m3) ozone concentrations for 16 Chinese cities, 2014-2016.
  • Pao Baylon, et al., Impact of biomass burning plumes on photolysis rates and ozone formation at the Mount Bachelor Observatory. Baylon and his coauthors examined biomass burning (BB) events at Mt. Bachelor Observatory (MBO) during the summer of 2015. Biomass burning can emit large amounts of aerosols and gases into the atmosphere. These plumes contain compounds that react with sunlight to produce ozone, a health hazard to sensitive individuals. The photochemistry in BB plumes is poorly understand. Baylon and his coauthors addressed this knowledge gap by using MBO data to calculate ozone production rates and comparing these values with modeled values. Read the full paper here.
  • Lei Zhang, et al., A quantification method for peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) using gas chromatography (GC) with a non-radioactive pulsed discharge detector (PDD). Zhang and his coauthors developed a method for continuous peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN) measurements using gas chromatography with a non-radioactive detector. PAN is a known precursor of ozone. Their method has high accuracy and is more readily deployable in field campaigns than the traditional gas chromatography method that utilizes a radioactive detector.  Read the full paper here.

2 New papers published in October

Two Jaffe Group members have published peer-reviewed papers in October. Well done to Xi Gong and Pao Baylon for their outstanding work!

Xi Gong and her coauthors used a statistical approach, the Generalized Additive Model,  to quantify ozone impacts from wildfires on 8 US cities. They showed that this approach can provide quantitative support for situations when large contributions from noncontrollable sources, such as wildfires, caused an exceedance of the EPA’s daily ozone standard.

Read the full paper here.

Pao Baylon and his coauthors looked at a Siberian biomass burning event in Spring 2015 that was observed at Mt. Bachelor Observatory and by satellite instruments, and also intercepted by a research aircraft. When the plume was in the eastern Pacific, it split into two plumes, one moving eastward toward MBO and the other moving northeast to Alaska and then south to the US Midwest. The second plume was observed by the aircraft in the Midwest. Baylon et al. found that the ozone production observed at MBO was higher than that of the aircraft plume. This was due to the plume at MBO being warmer and the aircraft plume being colder.

Read the full paper here.

4 New first-author papers in 2017

The Jaffe Group has published 4 first-author papers so far this year. Stay tuned for more! Click the following links to see each paper:

Aerobiology workshop organized by Jaffe Group

Aerobiology workshop participants in Bend, Oregon - May 2017
Aerobiology workshop participants in Bend, Oregon – May 2017

The Jaffe Group (specifically, Dan and Dee Ann) along with Andrew C. Schuerger of the University of Florida, Space Life Sciences Lab, organized a NASA-funded workshop in Bend, Oregon, at the beginning of May. This workshop gathered researchers from several universities and agencies to discuss a future experiment in “Aerobiology.” This is the study of the transport and biology of microbes in the atmosphere. Researchers plan to use Mt. Bachelor as a key sampling location to study the long-range transport of microbes in the global atmosphere. David Smith, now at NASA Ames Research Center, was one of the workshop participants. He is a UW alum (PhD Biology) and previously did ground-breaking work on aerobiology at Mt. Bachelor Observatory (see publications in 2011-2013).

In addition to PI Andrew Schuerger, David Smith, and Dan Jaffe, other participants were Co-PI Dale W. Griffin (US Geological Survey), Susannah M. Burrows (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory), Brent C. Christner (University of Florida), Cristina Gonzalez-Martin (University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain), Erin K. Lipp (University of Georgia), David G. Schmale (Virginia Tech), Boris Wawrik (University of Oklahoma), and Hongbin Yu (University of Maryland and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center).

Look for a future project studying microbes in the sky!

Ambrose publishes paper on new instrument for measurements of hydrogen cyanide

On June 1, Dr. Jesse Ambrose and colleagues published a paper in the journal Atmospheric Measurement Techniques that describes a new instrument for measurements of hydrogen cyanide (HCN), a selective tracer of biomass burning emissions, in the lower atmosphere. The instrument is capable of providing long-term HCN measurements in the background atmosphere and will serve as a valuable research tool for assessing the influence of wildfire and domestic wood burning smoke on atmospheric chemistry and air quality.

Read the paper here.