Wildfire aerosol in the troposphere and its impact on air quality and climate

Wildfires inject enormous amounts of aerosol (i.e., smoke) into the troposphere (altitude ≲ 15 km), impacting air quality, climate, and human health. Furthermore, the burden of wildfire aerosol in Canada and globally is expected to increase as climate change causes wildfires of growing frequency and size. Despite the importance of wildfire aerosol, the properties of these aerosols and how they age in the atmosphere by chemical reactions remain uncertain, leading to uncertainties when predicting their environmental impacts. We are focusing on key properties of wildfire aerosol, including reactivity, viscosity, optical properties, and cloud-nucleating ability, and determining how these properties change as wildfire aerosol reacts in the atmosphere. Techniques and instrumentation include flow tube reactors, FTIR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, the poke-flow technique, fluorescence recovery after photobleaching, fluorescence microscopy, and the droplet freezing technique.