Images of California’s wildfires this winter speak for themselves about the fires’ devastating effects. But those pictures don’t tell the whole story. Together with soil emissions, the fires are driving an increase in ground-level ozone pollution — causing a fundamental shift in our atmosphere’s chemistry, researchers say, and potentially rendering air pollution standards unmeetable.
“We’re entering a new air pollution regime,” says Ian Faloona, an atmospheric chemist at University of California, Davis.
Analyzing satellite data and ground-level observations, Faloona and his colleagues have teased apart the sources that contribute to ozone in major air basins in the southwestern United States. Soil and wildfire emissions of nitrogen-containing ozone precursors, collectively