Rawad Saleh
University of Georgia, GA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Smoke from wildfires contains light-absorbing particles that warm the atmosphere, and the strength of that warming is one of the least certain numbers in climate models. The main culprit is brown carbon, a class of organic particulate matter whose ability to absorb sunlight varies across three orders of magnitude depending on what burned and how.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Engineering
Chemistry
- Topics
brown carbon
black carbon
wildfire emissions
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2027
What they work on
- Conduct three intensive measurement campaigns of simulated wildland and prescribed fires at the U.S. Forest Service Center for Forest Disturbance Science combustion facility, testing how fuel type, firing technique and moisture content alter emissions of light-absorbing particles.
- Retrieve optical distributions — the spread of light-absorption properties within a smoke plume — for brown carbon and black carbon, using measured correlations between the particles' physical and chemical properties and their optical behavior.
- Parameterize brown and black carbon emission factors and optical distributions as a function of fire radiative power, the satellite-measurable heat output of a fire that serves as a proxy for combustion conditions, and combine these with remote sensing observations.
- Implement the new parameterizations in WRF-Chem, a coupled chemical transport and climate model, and run radiative transfer calculations to quantify brown carbon's contribution to atmospheric warming, including how photochemical aging changes it.
More about the research
Representing a quantity that spans such a huge range with a single average value introduces large errors, and this project sets out to replace that average with something better.
Why it matters
Wildfire smoke is a growing presence in many regions, and how much it warms or cools the planet is poorly pinned down because brown carbon's light absorption varies so widely. Parameterizations tied to fire radiative power, which satellites already measure, would let climate and air quality models represent smoke more realistically, improving estimates of the climate effects of wildfires and prescribed burns and informing how land managers weigh prescribed fire decisions.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christopher Jones
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Earth & Environmental Science
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Christopher Butenhoff
Portland State University, OR·Earth & Environmental Science
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Hamish Gordon
Carnegie Mellon University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Develop a new parameterization of atmospheric new particle formation that accounts for temperature and ions, using CERN CLOUD chamber data and field measurements, and evaluate it in climate models.
The school
University of Georgia: 27 labs on PI Pages, $628M a year on research, 598 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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