Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics The wildland fire emission inventory: western United States emission estimates and an evaluation of uncertainty

Abstract. Biomass burning emission inventories serve as critical input for atmospheric chemical transport models that are used to understand the role of biomass fires in the chem-ical composition of the atmosphere, air quality, and the cli-mate system. Significant progress has been achieved in the development of regional and global biomass burning emis-sion inventories over the past decade using satellite remote sensing technology for fire detection and burned area map-ping. However, agreement among biomass burning emis-sion inventories is frequently poor. Furthermore, the un-certainties of the emission estimates are typically not well characterized, particularly at the spatio-temporal scales per-tinent to regional air quality modeling. We present the Wildland Fire Emission Inventory (WFEI), a high resolution model for non-agricultural open biomass burning (hereafte