Biomass Burning Aerosol Emission Characterization

Biomass burning represents one of the principal sources of atmospheric particulate matter, releasing a complex mixture of black carbon, organic compounds and trace gases that influence air quality, human health and climate. Characterising emissions from forest fires, agricultural residue burning and biofuel use is impeded by the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of fire events, variations in fuel type and combustion conditions, and rapid chemical transformations during atmospheric transport. Advances in field measurements, laboratory combustion studies and inverse modelling have yielded more accurate emission factors for key tracers—among them levoglucosan, potassium and elemental carbon—and have improved estimates of pre-industrial and contemporary fire-driven aerosol radiative forcing. Proxy records such as ice-core black carbon and organic markers extend insights into past fire regimes, while state-of-the-art aerosol mass spectrometry and remote-sensing techniques allow near-real-time quantification of particle composition across diverse fire scenarios. Integrating these approaches is essential to reduce uncertainties in global and regional emission inventories, to refine climate model inputs and to inform mitigation strategies targeting biomass burning.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies have reconstructed global biomass burning emissions over the pre-industrial era by linking ice-core black carbon depositional records with atmospheric transport models, reducing uncertainties in historical aerosol radiative forcing and offering a refined dataset for climate projections. Complementary work has applied high-resolution aerosol mass spectrometry in controlled combustion facilities to derive emission factors for black carbon, primary organic aerosols and trace organics across a spectrum of biomass types and burn conditions, revealing systematic biases in existing inventories and underscoring the influence of combustion efficiency on aerosol composition.

Biomass Burning Aerosol Emission Characterization publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in biomass burning aerosol emission characterization across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Emission factor: Quantity of a specific pollutant emitted per unit mass of fuel burned.

Inverse modelling: Computational method for inferring emission sources and magnitudes from atmospheric observations.

Ice-core proxy: Chemical or physical signal preserved in glacier ice used to reconstruct past atmospheric conditions.

Black carbon: Light-absorbing particulate matter produced by incomplete combustion of carbonaceous fuels.

Levoglucosan: Organic molecular tracer derived from cellulose pyrolysis, used to identify biomass burning aerosols.

Aerosol mass spectrometry: Analytical technique to determine the chemical composition of individual aerosol particles in real time.

References

1. Improved biomass burning emissions from 1750 to 2010 using ice core records and inverse modeling. Nature Communications (2024).
2. Fixed source monitoring system for marker emission during biomass combustion. Renewable Energy (2023).
3. Boreal fire records in Northern Hemisphere ice cores: a review. Climate of the Past (2016).