• Rocky Mountain Research Station
• 240 West Prospect
• Fort Collins, CO 80526
• (970) 498-1100

LIDAR: A New Technology to Monitor Smoke Plume Dymanics in 3-D

Since 2005, the researchers from the Fire Chemistry Unit at the RMRS Fire Sciences Laboratory deploy a new mobile laboratory for field campaigns of wildfires. This laboratory is equipped with instruments for in-situ measurements and a mobile lidar (Light Detecting And Ranging instrument) for remote sensing of smoke plumes. Lidar is an instrument which is capable of measuring the optical properties of aerosol particles in real-time over a large area of 10-20 km. Lidar is the only instrument capable of obtaining detailed information on smoke characteristics in time and space from a measurement site outside the burning area with complete safety for the personnel involved.

The Fire Chemistry Unit has developed new methods for remote measurements of smoke particle properties and plume dynamics in three dimensions. The new measurement methodology and algorithms allow to determine the vertical profiles of atmospheric optical depth and extinction coefficient in the vicinity of a fire polluted by smoke particles. During the summer of 2006, the lidar was successfully deployed to the Gash Creek Fire in Montana and the Potato Fire in Idaho. We monitored the transformation of the smoke plumes in real time and then processed the data to obtain the smoke-plume optical characteristics. The lidar was also used to measure smoke plumes at the heights from 0.5 km to 6-7 km from the Tripod/Complex Fire in the Washington state.

The lidar measurement methodology that researchers from the Fire Chemistry Unit are applied to the smoke investigations will improve our understanding of smoke particle properties, smoke plume dynamics, and how the adverse effects can be mitigated. The collected information is also critical for validating smoke plume heights and dispersion for a variety of smoke dispersion models.

More information on this study can be found in: "Determination of extinction coefficient profiles from multiangle lidar data using a 'clone' of the optical depth," in Proceedings of the 23rd International Laser Radar Conference (ILRC23), pp. 283-286, (2006); "Development of lidar techniques to estimate atmospheric optical properties," in the Ph. D. Dissertation of M. Adam (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, October 2005); and "Determination of slope in lidar data using a duplicate of the inverted function," in the Applied Optics Early Posting Page. The poster presentation of the results of the research was made at the 23rd International Laser Radar Conference in Nara, Japan, on July 24, 2006.

Additional information about this research can be found at http://www.firelab.org.