DATE/TIME: Friday, May 8, 2026, 2:30 pm PLACE: ENR building, room 223 or this Remote Live option.
Lixu Jin
Rutgers University
Plumes to People: Constraining Wildfire Smoke Emissions, Chemistry, and Health Impacts
Wildfires release a complex mixture of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that shape ozone formation, particle pollution, and how quickly the atmosphere cleans itself. Many of these compounds have only recently been measured, which means current models often struggle to predict smoke behavior and its health impacts.
We used aircraft measurements from the WE-CAN (2018) and FIREX-AQ (2019) field campaigns to answer three major questions:
1. What do wildfires actually emit?
2. How does smoke chemistry change as plumes age?
3. What are the consequences for air quality and human health?
Key findings:
• Wildfire emission inventories underestimate total VOC emissions by more than a factor of six.
• Current air quality models are missing important reactive VOCs, especially furanoids, which explains major errors in early-plume chemistry.
• Adding furanoid chemistry to GEOS-Chem shows that furanoids produce up to 20 percent of global glyoxal and could be a major source of brown carbon.
• Smoke exposure during extreme fire years can increase cancer and non-cancer health risks far beyond what current air quality models predict.
This work provides insights into wildfire emissions and chemistry and offers a path toward more accurate atmospheric models and air quality forecasts in fire-prone regions.
Seminar Host:
Xiaomeng Jin
Department of Environmental Sciences, SEBS, Rutgers University