Downdrafts of Biomass Burning to Houston Enhanced by Local Convective Activity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In June 2023, an elevated smoke layer from record-breaking Canadian wildfires was transported across the eastern half of the United States, impacting air quality for millions of people. Houston, TX experienced a notable biomass burning (BB) event associated with this wildfire smoke from Jun 4 to 9, 2023. The vertical transport of this smoke layer down to the surface followed afternoon convective activity in the Houston urban area on Jun 6–8. Our monitoring sites at urban, rural, and coastal locations around Houston experienced different levels of wildfire smoke. Carbon monoxide, aerosol absorption, and the Absorption Ångström Exponent (AAE) revealed stronger smoke incursions overnight at the urban site. The average nighttime AAE during the BB event period was 1.28 with 384 ppbv of CO; by comparison, the monthly nighttime averages for Jun 2023 were 1.03 and 172 ppbv, respectively. Enhanced PM 2.5 and NO 2 coincided with BB tracers while higher ozone concentrations were observed the following day at downwind sites relative to the peak observed BB smoke sites. The nighttime NO 2 for the BB event was also significantly higher than the monthly average with standard deviation for Jun 2023 (14.5 ppbv versus 5.19 ± 4.61 ppbv, respectively). Ozone concentrations peaked over 100 ppbv on Jun 9 driven by clear skies after the overnight high BB. Understanding the role of convective activity in enhancing the downdraft of BB plumes to the surface will improve assessment of the long-range impacts of wildfire smoke on urban populations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".