Studying air pollution and weather feedbacks from wildfires over Greece using WRF-Chem

Wildfires are a major source of atmospheric aerosols and can have significant impacts on air quality and radiative forcing. In our work, we have utilized the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) to study the impact of wildfires on aerosol pollution and meteorological feedbacks, focusing on the geographical area of Greece as a test case. We focus on the summer season of 2021, during which intense wildfire activity occurred in the country. We have performed sensitivity experiments with and without emissions from fires as a way to quantify the impact of such emissions on atmospheric pollutants, AOD, radiative forcing and weather variables (temperature, humidity, winds). Our results show that wildfires can have a significant impact on AOD, with the magnitude of the effect depending on the size and intensity of the wildfire and the meteorological conditions. Our recent work has shown that fire prone areas determined using the FWI index seem to link closely with the areas in Greece with the highest burnt area. Since the emitted aerosols are an important parameter, we test how well the emissions correlate to the FWI. Overall, our work demonstrates the potential role of wildfires in the evolution of short-term weather conditions via fire pollution radiative forcing, and provides new insights into the mechanisms leading to such effects.