Impact of extreme wildfires from the Brazilian Forests and sugarcane burning on the air quality of the biggest megacity on South America.

Recently, extreme wildfires have damaged important ecosystems worldwide and have affected urban areas miles away due to long-range transport of smoke plumes. We performed a comprehensive analysis to clarify how smoke plumes from Pantanal and Amazon forests wildfires and sugarcane harvest burning also from interior of the state of São Paulo (ISSP) were transported and injected into the atmosphere of the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo (MASP), where they worsened air quality and increased greenhouse gas (GHG) levels. To classify event days, multiple biomass burning fingerprints as carbon isotopes, Lidar ratio and specific compounds ratios were combined with back trajectories modeling.