Geostationary aerosol retrievals of extreme biomass burning plumes during the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires

Robbins, Daniel J. V.; Poulsen, Caroline A.; Siems, Steven T.; Proud, Simon R.; Prata, Andrew T.; Grainger, Roy G.; Povey, Adam C.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-17-3279-2024

Articles | Volume 17, issue 10

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-17-3279-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-17-3279-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 10

Research article

|

29 May 2024

Research article |

| 29 May 2024

Geostationary aerosol retrievals of extreme biomass burning plumes during the 2019–2020 Australian bushfires

Daniel J. V. Robbins, Caroline A. Poulsen, Steven T. Siems, Simon R. Proud, Andrew T. Prata, Roy G. Grainger, and Adam C. Povey

Data sets

Bureau of Meteorology Satellite Low Level Data Bureau of Meteorology https://doi.org/10.25914/6TV5-F523

AERONET Aerosol Optical Depth Data Display Interface AERONET https://aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/data_display_aod_v3

JAXA Himawari Monitor P-Tree JAXA https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/ptree/

Earthdata Search NASA https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search

Model code and software

ORAC-CC/orac: ORAC Code for DOI (v09-beta) Adam Povey et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11217795

Short summary

Extreme wildfire events are becoming more common with climate change. The smoke plumes associated with these wildfires are not captured by current operational satellite products due to their high optical thickness. We have developed a novel aerosol retrieval for the Advanced Himawari Imager to study these plumes. We find very high values of optical thickness not observed in other operational satellite products, suggesting these plumes have been missed in previous studies.