Smoke designations for eastern Kansas monitoring sites during March-May 2022

Prescribed fires (fires intentionally set for mitigation purposes) produce pollutants, which have negative effects on human and animal health. One of the pollutants produced from fires is fine particulate matter (PM2.5). PM2.5 can penetrate deep into the lungs and harm cardiovascular and respiratory systems. The Flint Hills region of Kansas experiences extensive prescribed burning each spring (March - May). Smoke from prescribed fires is often understudied due to a lack of monitoring in the rural regions where prescribed burning occurs, as well as the short duration and small size of the fires. Our goal was to attribute PM2.5 concentrations to the prescribed burning in the Flint Hills. To determine PM2.5 increases from local burning, we used low-cost PM2.5 sensors (PurpleAir) and satellite observations. The Flint Hills were also affected by smoke transported from fires in other regions during 2022. We separated the transported smoke from smoke from fires in eastern Kansas. Based on data..., Daily PM2.5 measurements for ground-based monitoring sites in eastern Kansas were categorized by the type of smoke impacting the monitoring site using a decision tree. Designations were determined for every monitor during the eastern Kansas prescribed burning season (March - May) of 2022. The decision process considered the following variables: HMS smoke plumes and fire hotspots, in situ PM2.5 measurements from PurpleAir and EPA AQS sites, in situ coarse mode concentrations (PM10 - PM2.5) from EPA AQS sites, daily wind speed, categorization of the previous day, and proximity to an urban setting. , , # Smoke designations for eastern Kansas monitoring sites during March-May 2022

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4mw6m90h7](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4mw6m90h7)

These datasets contain the smoke designations for each available ground-based PM2.5 monitor in the eastern Kansas region (75 total) for every day during March through May of 2022. This includes monitors from the PurpleAir network, the Environmental Protection Agency Air Quality System (EPA AQS), and PurpleAir monitor that were deployed by Colorado State University. The locations of each monitor are reported and have been rounded for privacy of the monitor hosts.

## Description of the data and file structure

The data are formatted in comma-separated values files. In the smoke designation dataset, the first column is the date (format = Month/Day/Year) and the remaining columns are the monitoring site ID numbers. The dataset of the monitor locations includes the monitoring site ID numbers and the corresponding latitudes and lo...