Title: Emissions of key air pollutants and greenhouse gases from biomass burning.
Bio:
Dr. Ran Zhao received both his Bachelor’s and PhD degrees in Environmental Chemistry at the University of Toronto, Canada. He worked as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology before becoming an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Alberta in 2018, and later an associate professor in 2024. His team is engaged in a wide range of research topics related to the environment and atmospheric chemistry, air quality, and climate change. Specific research directions include wildfire and biomass burning emissions, indoor air quality, cloudwater chemistry, the development and application of low-cost air quality sensors, and air pollution in Canadian poultry facilities. Dr. Zhao is the recipient of a number of awards, including a Clean Air Award from Alberta Capital Airshed in 2022, a Petro Canada Emerging Investigator Award in 2023, and the Mehran Alaee Early Career Researcher Award in Environmental Chemistry by Chemical Institute of Canada in 2025.
Abstract:
Biomass burning (BB) is a major source of air pollutants and greenhouse gases to Earth’s atmosphere, affecting both regional air quality and global climate. BB is a universal source of air pollution across the globe, but takes a variety of formats. In Canada, wildfires are gaining frequency and severity due to the ongoing global warming. In many developing countries, domestic biofuel use is a major source of air pollutants. BB emissions are highly complex, depending heavily on the type of fuels and combustion conditions. Currently, the emission and chemistry of BB are not fully understood, hindering our predictive understanding of its climate and health impacts. In this presentation, I will highlight collective efforts of my group and collaborators, aiming to quantify the emission factors – the amount of pollutants emitted per unit mass of fuel – of important but understudied biomass fuels. In the first half, I will introduce results from a 2024 fire lab campaign conducted by Biomass Burning in Canada (BBCan), a network of Canadian researchers who study the impact of BB. We focused on surface fuels relevant to Canadian boreal forests- peat, mulch, and grass. In the second half, I will introduce an ongoing collaboration with researchers in India to study emissions arising from biofuels specific to rural India. In particular, crop residue burning has caused recurring deterioration of air quality in Northern India, but emission factors specific to Indian crop residue are still lacking in the literature. We have sourced actual crop fuels from rural India and quantified the emission factors of key species in the laboratory. For both studies, online measurement and advanced mass spectrometry were also utilized for detailed speciation of the emitted volatile organic compounds.