Date of Submission

Spring 2021

Academic Program

Environmental and Urban Studies

Project Advisor 1

Elias Dueker

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Wildfires are natural events that occur in arid, dry areas throughout the world, burning surrounding vegetation and biomass and releasing massive smoke plumes into the atmosphere. These plumes can contain and variety of pollutants that can be impactful to both environmental and human health, including carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx), ozone (O3), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), particulate matter (PM), and black carbon (BC) (Wu et al., 2018). With the effects of climate change on the rise, larger fires, more fire counts, and long duration burns are paired with broader and more extensive smoke plumes, many are beginning to question just how extensive these air quality impacts have the potential to be. In the case of California’s 2020 Wildfire season, a record setting number of fires burned throughout the months of August and September, leaving scorched earth and massive smoke plumes in their wake. As news of these fires made national headlines, residents of Kingston, NY and other surrounding East Coast communities grew concerned. Utilizing a combination of particulate matter monitoring equipment, satellite imagery, and weather projection models, this study aims to discover whether or not the west coast 2020 wildfire season has any impact on local air quality in the Hudson Valley Region.

Open Access Agreement

Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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