Improving our understanding of wildfire emissions through the synergistic use of DSCOVR EPIC products and other remote sensing data

The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and are designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific opportunity focuses on Black Carbon (BC) and Brown Carbon (BrC), two of the most important light absorbing substances in atmospheric aerosols. The research aims to assess the nature and global-scale magnitude of biomass burning aerosol impacts by better understanding the regionally-dependent atmospheric transformations of absorbing aerosol properties during downwind transport of smoke plumes. The project will utilize data from the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) sensor aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft, along with complementary data from instruments such as MISR on the Terra satellite and CALIOP on the CALIPSO satellite. The postdoctoral fellow will evaluate relationships among these remote sensing datasets to better understand the evolution of BC and BrC as smoke plumes are transported in different environments. Key tasks include becoming familiar with collected datasets, exploring potential relationships among retrieved variables with ancillary data, and improving understanding of BC and BrC property evolution due to mixing and aging.