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Vakkari, V.* ; Vettikkat, L.* ; Kommula, S.* ; Mukherjee, A.* ; Hao, L.* ; Backman, J.* ; Buchholz, A.* ; Gawlitta, N. ; Ihalainen, M.* ; Jaars, K.* ; Köster, K.* ; Le, V.* ; Miettinen, P.* ; Nissinen, A.* ; Czech, H. ; Alton, M.* ; Passig, J.* ; Peltokorpi, S.* ; Piedehierro, A.A.* ; Pullinen, I.* ; Rosewig, E.I.* ; Schobesberger, S.* ; Shukla, D. ; Siebert, S.J.* ; Somero, M.* ; Virkkula, A.* ; Welti, A.* ; Yli-Pirilä, P.* ; Ylisirniö, A.* ; Zimmermann, R. ; van Zyl, P.G.* ; Virtanen, A.* ; Sippula, O.*

Laboratory experiments on Savannah and European boreal forest fire emissions.

J. Geophys. Res. Atmos. 131:e2025JD044543 (2026)
Publ. Version/Full Text Research data DOI
Open Access Hybrid
Creative Commons Lizenzvertrag
Landscape fire is among the largest sources of aerosols and trace gases globally. However, the emissions are highly variable and strongly affected by the type of biomass and combustion characteristics. We investigated the effect of combustion characteristics on the burning emissions from three biomass types: woody plants and grasses from southern African savannah and European boreal forest surface based on experiments at the ILMARI combustion facility in Kuopio, Finland. Considering emission factors (EF) for organic aerosol (OA) and for the sum of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), we observed a linear increase in the EF with decreasing modified combustion efficiency (MCE) down to MCE of 0.6. For instance, for woody plants from savannah flaming combustion EFOA is 6.1 g kg−1 at MCE of 0.94, while extreme smoldering EFOA at MCE of 0.67 is 54 g kg−1. Interestingly, the effect of biomass type was minor compared to MCE, which was also seen for aerosol particle number size distributions. Likewise, the absorption Ångström exponent increased with decreasing MCE. Furthermore, OA in our experiments is absorbing not only at the short wavelengths, which is typical of brown carbon, but even at the longest wavelengths (880 and 950 nm), which are often considered to represent only absorption by black carbon. The biomass type impacted the OA and VOC composition, especially in higher O:C ratio for savannah grass emissions, irrespective of combustion characteristics.
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Publication type Article: Journal article
Document type Scientific Article
Keywords Biomass Burning ; Boreal Forest ; Emission Factor ; Savannah; Secondary Organic Aerosol; Biomass Burning Aerosol; Trace Gas Emissions; Mass-spectrometer; High-resolution; Source Apportionment; Optical-properties; Light-absorption; Crop Residue; Us Wildfire
ISSN (print) / ISBN 2169-897X
e-ISSN 2169-8996
Journal Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres
Quellenangaben Volume: 131, Issue: 7, Pages: , Article Number: e2025JD044543 Supplement: ,
Publisher Wiley
Publishing Place Hoboken, NJ
Reviewing status Peer reviewed
Institute(s) Cooperation Group Comprehensive Molecular Analytics (CMA)
Grants European Commission
Helmholtz Association
Research Council of Finland