Home Search Collections Journals About Contact us My IOPscience Impacts of increasing aridity and wildfires on aerosol loading in the intermountain Western US This content has been downloaded from IOPscience Please scroll down to see the full text 2017 Environ Res Lett 12 014006 (http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/12/1/014006) View the table of contents for this issue, or go to the journal homepage for more Download details: IP Address: 80.82.78.170 This content was downloaded on 07/01/2017 at 03:49 Please note that terms and conditions apply Environ Res Lett 12 (2017) 014006 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aa510a LETTER OPEN ACCESS Impacts of increasing aridity and wildfires on aerosol loading in the intermountain Western US RECEIVED 23 September 2016 REVISED 29 November 2016 A Gannet Hallar1,2,3, Noah P Molotch4,5, Jenny L Hand6, Ben Livneh7,8, Ian B McCubbin3,5, Ross Petersen1,3, Joseph Michalsky7,9, Douglas Lowenthal1,2 and Kenneth E Kunkel10 ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION December 2016 PUBLISHED January 2017 Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence 10 University of Utah, Department of Atmospheric Science, Salt Lake City, UT, USA Desert Research Institute, Division of Atmospheric Science, Reno, NV, USA Storm Peak Laboratory, Desert Research Institute, Steamboat Springs, CO, USA University of Colorado, Geography Department and Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, Boulder, CO, USA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA Colorado State University, Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Fort Collins, CO, USA Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, CO, USA Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, North Carolina State University, Asheville, NC, and National Centers for Environmental Information, Asheville, NC, USA Any further distribution of this work must maintain E-mail: gannet.hallar@utah.edu attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation Keywords: aridity, wildfires, aerosol, aerosol optical depth, IMPROVE and DOI Supplementary material for this article is available online Abstract Feedbacks between climate warming, land surface aridity, and wildfire-derived aerosols represent a large source of uncertainty in future climate predictions Here, long-term observations of aerosol optical depth, surface level aerosol loading, fire-area burned, and hydrologic simulations are used to show that regional-scale increases in aridity and resulting wildfires have significantly increased summertime aerosol loading in remote high elevation regions of the Intermountain West of the United States Surface summertime organic aerosol loading and total aerosol optical depth were both strongly correlated (p