Colgate Students Take Flight with NASA Wildfire Research

As hazy skies and poor air quality from wildfire smoke increasingly reach New York State, the impacts of wildfires burning hundreds of miles away become impossible to ignore. When intense fires release enough heat and moisture into the atmosphere, they create one of the atmosphere's most powerful, and lesser-known, weather phenomena - fire-induced thunderstorms called pyrocumulonimbus clouds (pyroCbs).

This summer, Dev Sethi '27 and Gabe Pollock-O'Dorisio '28 are working with Associate Professor of Chemistry Anne Perring on NASA's INjected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment (INSPYRE) to study pyroCbs. The team will collect black carbon measurements alongside researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Broomfield, Colo.

PyroCbs can inject volcanic-scale smoke plumes directly into the stratosphere, where they can circle the globe and linger for more than a year, altering atmospheric circulation. Black carbon, a fine particulate matter produced by burning biomass, is of particular interest because it absorbs sunlight and contributes to atmospheric warming.

INSPYRE is a large-scale airborne field campaign designed to answer three core questions: Which fires produce pyroCbs and why? What determines whether a pyroCB will inject smoke directly into the stratosphere? And how does that injected smoke affect atmospheric composition?

Sethi and Pollock-O'Dorisio spent their first weeks on the project preparing in Hamilton, N.Y., writing code, working through previous datasets, and familiarizing themselves with the SP2 - a laser-based instrument that measures black carbon.

"When particles enter the laser, they burn up like a tiny star and you can measure the light they emit," Sethi explains. He says that the instrument measures the size of each particle and whether it is coated with other organic materials.

They will have the chance to operate the SP2 during flights on a Gulfstream V aircraft, owned by the National Science Foundation and operated out of the Research Aviation Facility at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They will also help with instrument maintenance and calibration to minimize instrument error and ensure data quality.

The data Sethi and Pollock-O'Dorisio collect for NASA will be processed into a usable form for public release. "It is important to make sure that all of the data is accurate since sometimes issues such as contamination in the instrument can affect the numbers," Pollock-O'Dorisio explains. He shares that it is essential for the raw data set to be reviewed because a researcher reading raw data would not be able to distinguish between correct or flawed readings.

This research will be the starting point for Sethi and Pollock-O'Dorisio, who will likely write their senior theses on this topic with Perring. They also plan to present this work at national meetings and, eventually, submit their findings for publication in peer-reviewed literature.