The number of homes being destroyed in wildfires has been on the rise in recent decades, and new research shows that such blazes add more pollution to the atmosphere than previously known.
Using new data, a team of scientists has assembled one of the first comprehensive analyses of emissions from homes burned in wildfires. What they found is that such pollution is serious, and in some cases can exceed emissions from all other human sources.
“However, it's currently not accounted for in any operational air quality forecast system,” said Wenfu Tang, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and lead author of a new paper in the journal Nature.
For hydrochloric acid, one of the pollutants studied, average annual emissions from burning homes between 2016 and 2020 exceeded all other human emission sources in California and Tennessee.
In Colorado and Oregon, hydrochloric acid from burned homes surpassed all other human emission sources during at least one year in the same period. Burning homes also emit the toxin lead, and structure fires in California contributed to more than half of the human lead emissions in 2018.
Tang also noted that exposures to the many toxins emitted from burning homes are much more acute and intense for those nearby compared to year-round exposures.
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