Integration of a Smoke Plume Rise Scheme and 3BEM-FRP Emission Inventory into gocartMPAS: Application to the 2024 South America Wildfire Season

Wildfires inject aerosols into the atmosphere at varying altitudes, modifying long‐range transport, which affects air quality, atmospheric chemistry, human health, and Earth's radiative budget. As biomass burning is a major and recurrent environmental problem in South America, the development of the next generation of Earth System model, named Model for Ocean-laNd-Atmosphere predictioN (MONAN), needs to account for the wildfire aerosol emission fields and their effects included in the model physics formulations. The MONAN’s atmospheric component, the Model for Prediction Across Scales - Atmosphere (MPAS-A) stand alone v8.3.1, is being advanced through the coupling with the Second-Generation Goddard Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport Model (GOCART-2G) described in Collow et al. (2024), forming the so-called gocartMPAS system. Building on the importance of accurate plume rise parametrization, this study involves the implementation of Freitas et al. (2007, 2011) plume rise model (PRM) within the gocartMPAS framework to assist the fire emission module with the vertical distribution of the hot smoke produced by the fires. As part of the planned experiments, we will investigate the 2024 biomass burning season over South America by conducting simulations during the July–October period on a global quasi-uniform mesh with 60 km resolution. Physical parameterizations are from the “convection_permitting" suite, with initial conditions from ERA5 reanalysis. Regarding the input data for the plume rise scheme, we employed Fire Radiative Power, Active Fire Size and biomass burning emissions from the Brazilian Biomass Burning Emission Model with Fire Radiative Power (3BEM-FRP) inventory, which was processed in a latitude-longitude grid using the Prep-Chem-Src v1.8.3 preprocessor. We will discuss the overall characteristics of plume injection heights and transport of black carbon, organic carbon and brown carbon, including an initial evaluation of the aerosol mass concentration and optical depth simulated with the CAMS reanalysis dataset. These efforts are intended to improve the representation of wildfire smoke plume rise and to increase the accuracy of wildfire aerosol transport in the gocartMPAS model.