Vegetative burning

Vegetative burning was found to account for as much as 40% of the total particulate mass on cold winter days, or nearly 9% annually. This led to the identification of a source of 6500 tons/year of previously uninventoried emissions and prompted major efforts to reduce impacts from residential wood burning. 

Dust from paved and unpaved roads is the most predominant source in Portland. Accurate emissions data is critical to the model s ability to account for all of the measured mass, as well as to the development of a successful strategy. Although the CMB model cannot distinguish between dust emissions from paved and unpaved roads, it can typically assign total dust impacts to within a 5-6% uncertainty. Leaded automotive tailpipe exhaust was selected because it can be accurately estimated by CMB and is the third most abundant contributor to the annual particulate mass, after road dust and vegetative burning. 

Identified by a telephone survey of home-owners, were verified by comparing dispersion model and CMB vegetative burning estimates. 

Deaths occur in a variety of situations clothed or unclothed, the corpse maybe wrapped following death (Goff 1992), covered with vegetation, burned... 

Scholes, R. J., D. Ward, and C. O. Justice. 1996. Emissions of trace gases and aerosol particles due to vegetation burning in southern-hemisphere Africa, Journal of Geophysical Research 101 23677-23682. 

DeCesar R. T. and Cooper J. A., The quantitative impact of residential wood combustion and other vegetative burning sources on the air quality in Medford, Oregon. Report Oregon Graduate Center, Beaverton, Oregon (1983). 

Chemical Species Paved Road Dust Vegetative Burning Primary Crude Oil Motor Vehicle Limestone... 

Mar et al. (2000) found five factors, which they identified with apparent sources vehicular emissions (enriched in Fe, Zn, OC, EC, NO2, and CO) soil dust (enriched in Si, Al, and Fe) vegetative burning (highly enriched with K) a local SO2 source and sulfate enriched factor, thought to represent regional coal, fired power plants. 

As to measuring the environmental dimension, the area of vegetation burned was used and for the utility in human dimension, the number of people exposed to risk of injury. 

The indicated production rates of N2O by burning are comparable to the removal rate in the stratosphere, which is still the only well-documented sink for nitrous oxide. The large oceanic source of N2O once derived by Hahn [31] is now strongly disputed and more recent observations point to a much smaller source [32, 33]. It seems, therefore, that vegetation burning as a source of N2O could be of a similar substantial importance. 

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