Dr. Wade Permar is a key SMART FIRES team member at the University of Montana. He specifically works on the Fire and Smoke Science thrust's new "super van," a mobile smoke sampling lab with revolutionizing UM's and Montana's ability to ask and answer questions about smoke chemistry, a crucial part of understanding both wild and percribed fire. Below read Permar's update on the van's progress as well as the role it plays in SMART FIRES.
What is the update on your work and the smoke van since the September All Hands Meeting?
We have the van all together, all the instrumentations in it. I think from the all hands meeting we were mostly loaded up so now we're fully operational. Since then we've done three prescribed fires out at Lubrecht Experimental Forest, two fairly small ones and then one a little bit larger with the coordination of the fire center.
How did it go?
It's been a rolling start in terms of getting everything up and going. The first couple times we didn't have all our instrumentation running. But by the third fire we were 100 percent on. Everything went really well.
It was a kind of a funny shorter burning season in some ways because it went from way too flammable to not flammable in a strange window. But we did sample our goal of three controlled burns.
We got lots of good data. And now we're working on getting through it. Our grad student Lu Tan is doing kind of the bulk of the heavy listening for our VOC work. And then I've been working on some of the other trace gases. We look at CO2, methane, carbon monoxide, ozone, and a couple other particulate matter variables.
We have been trying to build a story from what we've seen so far so that we're kind of ready and have a better idea of what exactly we want to do come spring and.
I've been pretty happy. The van like worked way, way better than we could have hoped. The battery life is phenomenal. On the third burn that we did, we actually were able to leave the van out overnight to see what the emissions were coming off the burn when we left. We ran all of our payload on battery power for the whole night, which was totally nerve wracking at the time, but feels really good now that it worked out.
What have been the difficulties and challenges so far?
The hardest thing for us is getting the van into the smoke. Wind forecast is good to a point, but for like there's just so much swirling wind that you can be parked in a great spot getting lots of smoke and then it just blows the other way for the next hour.
Another one of the annoying challenges with the van is that everything a vehicle emits is also a kind of contaminant in the smoke. There is a lot of overlap between combustion sources, so we need to kind of isolate the van signals.
One of the things that I need to add to the van this winter are data logging flags for when the engine's on and when generators are running. That has been one of the bigger new hurdles that I hadn't thought about too deeply beforehand.
Besides that, the lack of certainty around the timing is something I think everyone on the project is going to have to deal with. Everything happens all of a sudden. You don't have anything planned, and then the window is good and it's the day before and we're going to go out to burn. Or the morning of we're not going to be able to do it. Which does add like some difficulty in planning, especially for keeping things up and running.
It really is just a process of making sure that personnel are capable of leaving the next day and that we're able to get instruments turned on, the van warmed up, things like that.
Did all of the equipment work well?
I think I had two instruments that didn't play very nice. Our nitrogen tracer was acting up and then the ozone monitor wasn’t functioning super well during this period. But they are going to be more important when we start looking at some of the downwind impacts of smoke. Those aren’t as important next to the fire. And there are some interesting learning curves when we start putting a bunch of instruments together. For example, there’s six different instruments sampling off of common inlet lines which all have their own pumps bringing in different amounts of air. And different pressures in the lines will knock them out of whack. So we have been fighting that a little bit.
How did you get into smoke science?
I stumbled into smoke science. I actually started grad school here with Lu Hu. He was starting the same semester essentially as faculty, and he had a grant for working on wildfire smoke through airborne sampling through a campaign for Western Wildfire Experiment for Cloud chemistry, Aerosol absorption and Nitrogen.
We loaded kind of the instrument that our lab is built around–that's a Proton Transfer Reaction Time of Flight Mass spectrometer–which just basically measures like hundreds of different volatile organic carbons. And we had one built that is made for aircraft deployment, all in a special rack and vibration dampened and good to go on a plane.
I was involved in that both running everything on the plane and then flying through wildfire plumes all over the Western U.S. and that more or less became my Ph.D.
When I graduated, I started working as a postdoc with Lu and this project also kind of came along. And at that point I was super excited to work on the van. That's been kind of the real highlight of the last year and a half of my work world and getting to build that up and kind of spec it and design it.
I didn't necessarily plan on studying smoke when I got up here, but it is a really cool field. I think it's just super pertinent for Montana, obviously. I think every summer we're reminded of it. And from a chemistry standpoint, it's really cool too. There's just so much that's like, as a source of different compounds to the atmosphere, you can't find something that gives you just more complex of a picture. It's like there's just everything's emitted from a fire in different amounts. It leaves you lots of little avenues that you can kind of poke and explore from that perspective.
Where do you see the research of the FSS team and SMART FIRES and the van in the context of the larger wildfire issue?
That is a hard question because we're working so much in the little pocket of prescribed fire.
Right now we're really curious about like the emissions from prescribed fires and how those compare to wildfires. And then moving down the line, we'll start looking at kind of how those emissions evolve and impact communities downwind.
One of the great things about the van is we can sit by the fire, we can sample smoke for a day as they're lighting, and then we can move down to somewhere in the Blackfoot Valley away from Lubrecht Experimental Forest and we can catch the smoke that drifts there overnight and we can sample what they see in town versus what comes off the fire.
There's a couple pictures of how that fits all into the big wildfire question. One we'd want to know is how different or similar are the emissions. Is one burn cleaner or does one react differently when it's in the atmosphere? And by extension is that because we're burning at a different time of year?
Pollution is usually driven by two factors. You have your primary emissions, what comes right off the fire, you have lots of particles, lots of ozone that may or may not be around. Then, as that goes downwind on a hot sunny day, the sun actually causes all sorts of photochemistry and creates a bunch of new pollutants, specifically ozone. But you can also get more particulate matter.
Those changes are more pronounced during hot summer months. And so what we're pretty curious to like dig into is how the timing changes the fire chemistry. We're burning in later fall early spring. In theory you should be seeing less the enhanced long-range impacts. That all feeds into these arguments of like why it would be better to prioritize prescribed fires and like as part of a management system.
Was wildfire a big deal where you grew up in Flagstaff Arizona?
It is, but it's timed differently. A lot of Arizona fire season happens, I believe, earlier in the summer just because they have kind of a monsoonal pattern.
I grew up around giant ponderosa forest which is kind of similar to what you see in the low valleys around Montana. Historically these pine forests would be burning every 10, 15 years, in these low intensity ground fires.
Right after the Smart Fire meeting, there was the Smoke Wildfire Smoke symposium was held here at Missoula too. And that was more of a health science side of the world, but had a lot of, you know, people from kind of all different agencies. It's really interesting to kind of think about prescribed and wildfire in the context of different forest types where you have, like, fires increasing generally, like across the board in all forests.
But you can start breaking it down into forests that have historically seen fire and, like, rely on it. Other forests that, like, didn't often have a lot of fire, but when they went, they went really big and kind of start, like, getting into these finer details that everyone's really interested in now as we're looking at it.
We definitely grew up with fire. It was always a concern.
What is happening with the van outside of the fire season?
It's sitting on campus at our facilities, and it's been more or less running as a stationary site. We keep a lot of the instrumentation sampling and we're able do ambient monitoring in town. We have some other long term monitoring work that we've done off the chemistry building. This is a nice addition to that.
What are the next steps?
This spring, we will be getting everything back up and running and working to have the van fully functioning. We're hoping for five good burns in the spring for the mobile lab sample.