Understanding and forecasting wildfire emissions impacts with modeling and data assimilation

The NASA Postdoctoral Program offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects. These one- to three-year fellowships are competitive and designed to advance NASA's missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. This specific research opportunity focuses on investigating the use of chemical transport models together with data assimilation of in situ and/or profiler measurements and remote/satellite retrievals with 'top-down' emissions estimation to better understand and forecast the impacts of wildfire emissions on air quality, human health, and the environment. The research focuses on interfacing global and regional chemical transport models in a state-of-the-science regional, ensemble, atmospheric composition forecast/assimilation system with dynamic emissions estimation to study the impacts of wildfire emissions on air quality. Research areas include using in situ and remote observations to improve wildfire emissions estimates and transport, theory-based improvements to emissions quantification, top-down emissions estimation methods, application of chemical data assimilation, and increasing computational efficiency for chemical data assimilation and emissions estimation in coupled global/regional forecast/assimilation systems.