Wildfire smoke and its complex chemistry

When wildfire smoke gets emitted to the atmosphere, large pollution plumes can be transported hundred of miles, carrying pollutants that affect public health far way. Wildfires consume thousands of hectares of land across the globe, burning the biomass in trees, bushes, grass, and peat. The smoke, soot and pollution produced can rise several kilometers in altitude and spread across the globe.

University of Kentucky chemistry professor Marcelo Guzman leads a National Science Foundation research project, which is studying how emissions from biomass burning, including wildfires, change with time in the atmosphere to create new chemicals that impact the health of societies and the climate of Earth. The team lead by Guzman carefully studied the heterogeneous atmospheric chemistry of methoxyphenols in the laboratory. Methoxyphenols are among the most abundant molecules emitted during wildfires and can react at interfaces, i.e. such as on the surface of aerosol particles from pollution. The new work indicates not only that electron and proton transfer processes are favored to quickly convert aromatic molecules into highly water-soluble products, but that reactive phenoxide and semiquinone radicals play key roles to form coupling products of heavier molecular weight such as those depicted in the figure.

More information:
Surface Oxidation of Phenolic Aldehydes: Fragmentation, Functionalization, and Coupling Reactions, by Md. Sohel Rana and Marcelo I. Guzman. Published in J. Phys. Chem. A 2022, doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpca.2c04963

Provided by University of Kentucky