Atmospheric Convection and Aerosol Absorption Boost Wildfire Smoke Injection

Smoke released from increasingly severe wildfires has exerted widening impacts on the climate, ecosystem, and human life. Precisely quantifying these effects requires accurately representing smoke injection height in climate and air quality models. However, existing parameterizations of smoke injection height often diverge from actual observations, commonly underestimating smoke injection height from extreme burnings. In this study, we improve a widely used smoke injection model by integrating two critical processes: aerosol radiative absorption and atmospheric convection. The new parameterization, optimized and validated by satellite measurements of smoke extinction profiles above active fires, achieves a 10% reduction in root mean square error and an over 95% reduction in mean bias compared to its predecessor. Such improvements are especially pronounced in tropical and shrubland-dominated regions. This study underscores the critical role of aerosol self-lofting and convective processes in vertical dispersion of wildfire smoke, toward better quantifying its climate and environmental effects.