Impacts of fire emissions and transport pathways on the interannual variation of CO in the tropical upper troposphere
Abstract. Carbon monoxide (CO) is an important tracer to study the transport of fire-generated pollutants from the surface to the upper troposphere (UT). This study analyzed the relative importance of fire emission, convection and climate conditions on the interannual variation of CO in the tropical UT, by using satellite observations, reanalysis data and transport pathway auto-identification method developed in our previous study. Empirical orthogonal function (EOF) and singular value decomposition (SVD) methods are used to identify the dominant modes of CO interannual variation in the tropical UT and factors that are related to these modes. Results show that the leading EOF mode is dominated by CO anomalies over Indonesia related to El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This is consistent with previous findings by directly evaluating CO anomaly field. Transport pathway analysis suggests that the differences of UT CO between different ENSO types over the tropical continents are mainly dominated by the "local convection" pathway, especially the average CO transported by this pathway. The relative frequency of the "advection within the lower troposphere (LT) followed by convective vertical transport" pathway appears to be responsible only for the UT CO differences over the west-central Pacific between El Niño and La Niña years.