Emissions of trace organic gases from western U.S. wildfires based on WE-CAN aircraft measurements

We present emission measurements of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) for western U.S. wildland fires made on the NSF/NCAR C-130 research aircraft during the Western Wildfire Experiment for Cloud Chemistry, Aerosol Absorption, and Nitrogen (WE-CAN) field campaign in summer 2018. VOCs were measured with complementary instruments onboard the C-130, including a proton-transfer-reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometer (PTR-ToF-MS) and two gas chromatography (GC)-based methods. Agreement within combined instrument uncertainties (50% for 57 individual VOC EFs representing more than half the organic carbon mass. Finally, we found little fire-to-fire variability for the mass fraction contributions of individual species to the total measured VOC emissions, suggesting that a single speciation profile can describe VOC emissions for the wildfires in coniferous ecosystems sampled during WE-CAN.