Evaluation of the smoke-injection height from wild-land fires using remote-sensing data

A new methodology for the estimation of smoke-injection height from wild-land fires is proposed and evaluated. It is demonstrated that the approaches developed for estimating the plume rise from stacks, such as the formulas of G. Briggs, can be formally written in terms characterising the wild-land fires: fire energy, size and temperature. However, these semi-empirical methods still perform quite poorly because the physical processes controlling the uplift of the wildfire plumes differ from those controlling the plume rise from stacks. The proposed new methodology considers wildfire plumes in a way similar to Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE) computations. The new formulations are applied to a dataset collected within the MISR Plume Height Project for about 2000 fire plumes in North America and Siberia. The estimates of the new method are compared with remote-sensing observations of the plume top by the MISR instrument, with two versions of the Briggs' plume-rise formulas, with the 1-D plume-rise model BUOYANT, and with the prescribed plume-top position (the approach widely used in dispersion modelling). The new method has performed significantly better than all these approaches. For two-thirds of the cases, its predictions deviated from the MISR observations by less than 500 m, which is the uncertainty of the observations themselves. It is shown that the fraction of good predictions is much higher (>80 %) for the plumes reaching the free troposphere.