Wildfires in the United States have increased dramatically in recent decades and the trend is likely to continue this century under the anthropogenic climate change. This highlights the urgent need to improve estimates of atmospheric smoke deposition for better assessing the smoke impacts on air quality, ecosystems, and human health. While great efforts in developing necessary tools have been made, monitoring and modeling smoke deposition still faces many big challenges, which limits our capacity to provide timing and quality estimates of smoke deposition and contributes to uncertainties in estimating total deposition. In this presentation we propose a research to address these challenges through applying satellite products and field measurement data to improving TDep Measurement-Model Fusion (TDep MMF) method used to provide total deposition maps. The research efforts include improving smoke aerosol schemes and specifications in the EPA's Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model, evaluating the roles of smoke feedback in reducing uncertainties in smoke deposition modeling, simulating smoke transport and deposition of historical wildland fires, incorporating the smoke deposition estimates into the existing TDep MMF, and assessing the air quality and human health impacts of smoke deposition. The expanded NADP TDep tool is expected to help better communicate smoke and total air quality and atmospheric deposition results.

¹ USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, Athens, GA

² University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN

³ Emory University, Atlanta, GA

⁴ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Clean Air and Power Division, Washington DC

⁵ NASA MSFC, Huntsville, AL

⁶ Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, UW-Madison, Madison, WI

* Corresponding Author: yongqiang.liu@usda.gov