Impacts of enhanced biomass burning in the boreal forests in 1998 on tropospheric chemistry and the sensitivity of model results to the injection height of emissions

Carbon monoxide reached record high levels in the northern extratropics in the late summer and fall of 1998 as a result of anomalously large boreal fires in eastern Russia and North America. We investigated the effects of these fires on CO and tropospheric oxidants using a global chemical transport model (GEOS‐Chem) and two independently derived inventories for the fire emissions that differ by a factor of two. We find that it is essential to use both surface and column observations of CO to constrain the magnitude of the fire emissions and their injection altitude. Our results show that the larger of the two inventories appears more reliable and that about half of the emissions were injected above the boundary layer. The boreal fire emissions cause a much larger enhancement in ozone when about half the emissions are released above the boundary layer than when they are released exclusively in the boundary layer, as a consequence of the role of PAN as a source of NOx as air descends in regions far from the fires.