© Author(s) 2007. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Arctic smoke – record high air pollution levels in the European Arctic due to agricultural fires in Eastern Europe in spring 2006

• Main Authors: A. Stohl, T. Berg, J. F. Burkhart, A. M. Fjæraa, C. Forster, A. Herber, Ø. Hov, C. Lunder, W. W. Mcmillan, S. Oltmans, M. Shiobara, D. Simpson, S. Solberg, K. Stebel, J. Ström, K. Tørseth, R. Treffeisen, K. Virkkunen, K. E. Yttri
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2007
• Subjects: Arctic; Iceland; Spitsbergen
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.404.9386; http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/29/61/30/PDF/acp-7-511-2007.pdf

Abstract. In spring 2006, the European Arctic was abnormally warm, setting new historical temperature records. During this warm period, smoke from agricultural fires in Eastern Europe intruded into the European Arctic and caused the most severe air pollution episodes ever recorded there. This paper confirms that biomass burning (BB) was indeed the source of the observed air pollution, studies the transport of the smoke into the Arctic, and presents an overview of the observations taken during the episode. Fire detections from the MODIS instruments aboard the Aqua and Terra satellites were used to estimate the BB emissions. The FLEX-PART particle dispersion model was used to show that the smoke was transported to Spitsbergen and Iceland, which was confirmed by MODIS retrievals of the aerosol optical depth (AOD) and AIRS retrievals of carbon monoxide (CO)