Continental-scale Atmospheric Impacts of the 2020 Western U.S. Wildfires
The wildfire season in the Western United States (U.S.) was anomalously large in 2020, with a majority of burned area due to lightning ignitions resulting in overall fire emissions of carbon monoxide (CO) in the Western region almost 3 times the 2001–2019 average. We used the Community Atmosphere Model version 6 with Chemistry (CAM-chem) to investigate how the 2020 fires in the Western U.S.