Satellite-Based CO and NOx Emission Estimates from South-Central Chilean Plantation Fires
Abstract
We present top-down CO and NOx emission estimates for a south-central Chilean fire from Sentinel-5P/TROPOMI observations. Applying the Cross-Sectional Flux method to CO and the Exponentially Modified Gaussian method to NO2, with uncertainty propagated through 500-member Monte Carlo ensembles, we retrieve a median CO flux of 1,273 kg s⁻¹ (95% CI: 676–1,843 kg s⁻¹) and a median NOx flux of 7,505 g s⁻¹ (95% CI: 3,620–9,655 g s⁻¹) on the peak fire day. Against the hourly Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) inventory, the top-down median CO flux is 21 times GFAS for the overpass hour and 4.1 times its local-day mean. The top-down NOx flux is 2.4 times GFAS at the overpass hour but 52% below its local-day mean, and the retrieved CO:NOx ratio is 8.5–8.7 times the GFAS ratio in both cases. GFAS sets its ratio with generic extratropical-forest and savanna emission factors; its forest NOx emission factor is 2.5 times a TROPOMI-derived temperate-forest value. To map the region affected by the smoke, we drove a Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) forward dispersion simulation with the retrieved CO flux: the plume traveled more than 2,000 km north-northwestward within 96 hours, along the Chilean coast and over the subtropical southeast Pacific, where TROPOMI observed enhanced CO.
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BibTeX
@misc{perezcarrasco2026satellitebased,
title = {{Satellite-Based CO and NOx Emission Estimates from South-Central Chilean Plantation Fires}},
author = {Manuel Perez-Carrasco and Qindan Zhu and Cecilia Garraffo and Xiong Liu and Jia Chen},
howpublished = {EarthArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31223/x5q812},
url = {https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/15693/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Satellite-Based CO and NOx Emission Estimates from South-Central Chilean Plantation Fires
AU - Manuel Perez-Carrasco
AU - Qindan Zhu
AU - Cecilia Garraffo
AU - Xiong Liu
AU - Jia Chen
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/23
PB - EarthArXiv
DO - 10.31223/x5q812
UR - https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/15693/
AB - We present top-down CO and NOx emission estimates for a south-central Chilean fire from Sentinel-5P/TROPOMI observations. Applying the Cross-Sectional Flux method to CO and the Exponentially Modified Gaussian method to NO2, with uncertainty propagated through 500-member Monte Carlo ensembles, we retrieve a median CO flux of 1,273 kg s⁻¹ (95% CI: 676–1,843 kg s⁻¹) and a median NOx flux of 7,505 g s⁻¹ (95% CI: 3,620–9,655 g s⁻¹) on the peak fire day. Against the hourly Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) inventory, the top-down median CO flux is 21 times GFAS for the overpass hour and 4.1 times its local-day mean. The top-down NOx flux is 2.4 times GFAS at the overpass hour but 52% below its local-day mean, and the retrieved CO:NOx ratio is 8.5–8.7 times the GFAS ratio in both cases. GFAS sets its ratio with generic extratropical-forest and savanna emission factors; its forest NOx emission factor is 2.5 times a TROPOMI-derived temperate-forest value. To map the region affected by the smoke, we drove a Hybrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory (HYSPLIT) forward dispersion simulation with the retrieved CO flux: the plume traveled more than 2,000 km north-northwestward within 96 hours, along the Chilean coast and over the subtropical southeast Pacific, where TROPOMI observed enhanced CO.
ER -