#i perhaps have been smoking the longleaf

[fleur-bbyy]

one time when I was in elementary school I didn’t know how to use our new toaster but I wanted a toaster strudel so I put it in the microwave on a paper plate with aluminum lettering for god knows how long and the strudel caught fire and blew up

[jpmester-blog]

Production of N2O5 and ClNO2 through nocturnal processing of biomass-burning aerosol

In this paper on biomass burning and ClNO2 formation Ahern et. al. conduct experiments on brush and trees one might encounter in a camping trip bonfire. How these different fuel sources affect Cl concentration in smoke is also of research interest. According to the New Jersey Department of Health and Senior services, “Nitrosyl chloride is a corrosive chemical and contact can severely irritate and burn the skin and eyes” and “nose and throat...” as well as “irritate the lungs causing coughing and/or shortness of breath.”

During the first weekend in April, Fuego and I went on a weekend trip to Harriman State Park. After an afternoon hike and dip in Lake Skenonto, we retired to the campsite for dinner. A fire emerged as the primary activity of the night. Something about stoking the embers and watching the flames dance within the rock sanctuary we had corralled them in seemed primal and soothing. “The fire burns my face but I like the warmth” was a common sentiment among the group; position around the fire soon became an exact science, friends choosing their level of comfort with nitrosyl chloride exposure among other pollutants. Naturally, I was less than a foot away from the flames. As the authors of the above study note, ClNO2 is specific to nocturnal environments because photolysis changes the chlorine reaction chemistry.

I was curious about the abbreviation chosen for biomass-burning aerosol, “BBA.” I wasn’t comfortable with its similarity to other abbreviations in Millennial vernacular -for good reason. Apparently during World War II, members of the british army used an abbreviation to remind them which parts of their body they most certainly needed to attend to in the shower, “BBA.”

Four different aerosol sources; ammonium bisulfate, sawgrass, cutgrass, and birch wood were tested in the furnace attached to the teflon gas chamber for smoke production. Although the researchers went to the trouble of obtaining grass native to Georgia from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, they chose to use “birch wood” from a local grocery store in Pennsylvania. Mind you, one of the first mundane comparisons drawn in this research is its relation to atmospheric aerosol deposition from wildfires. In 2017, PA had a whopping 534 fires with a total acreage burned of 1,649. Meanwhile in California during that same year, there were 9,133 total fires burning a total of 1,248,606 acres; on average, each fire burned 137 acres (compared to 3 acres in PA).

A former firefighter answering a Quora blog questions claims that Oak, Digger Pine, forest brush, and Sierra mixed conifer were recently implicated in California’s Camp and Woolsey fires. So why not go the trouble of obtaining one of these types of fire fuel sources for research? The authors do not assume that Cl composition is the same for all trees, as evidenced in their supplemental information. Studies have been done on “longleaf pine, Douglas fir, black spruce, and ponderosa pine” all showing little to no Cl content for the conifer family of trees. I still hold that if the authors wanted their research to have a higher impact they might have considered using fuel sources indigenous to regions where wildfires are more common (think anywhere in the Western United States, really).

Mass spectrometry and IR were used to ascertain the identity and abundance of both N2O5 and ClNO2. Below is the most significant of the plots shared, comparing ozone injection to chemical prevalence over a period of about 2 hours. It clearly demonstrates that the grasses chosen have a higher chlorine output than the wood. Given the fuss that was made to obtain Savannah, Georgia grass and Pennsylvania grocery store firewood, I would have liked to see more than 3 experiments conducted for each fuel source. An average plot might have been more demonstrative of study findings.

Study authors mention briefly the potential for the teflon bag used for smoke collection to absorb small amounts of Cl during each experiment. I am also interested to see the amount of fluoride ions that might have dislodged throughout the study [as teflon is a carbon polymer with numerous terminal fluorines] and whether this phenomena could affect concentrations of ClNO2 or other chemical species. Even if this effect did not play a significant role in this study, perhaps it could help future researchers refine this study.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.7b04386

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.est.7b04386/suppl_file/es7b04386_si_001.pdf

https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/1396.pdf

https://www.fireweatheravalanche.org/fire/

http://www.docs.dcnr.pa.gov/cs/groups/public/documents/document/dcnr_20033434.pdf

http://cdfdata.fire.ca.gov/incidents/incidents_stats?year=2017