Cooking food using wood as fuel can produce ice-active fine particles as emissions

The SUSTAINE measurement campaign studied the emissions of cooking equipment that is commonly used in the developing world and the emissions from the wood fuels used in them.

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The results of our measurements revealed particulate emissions from the cooking equipment can significantly promote the formation of ice clouds in the upper atmosphere.

Slightly under half of humanity – about 2.8 billion people, use wood fuel for their daily cooking. The use of solid fuel in food production produces a globally significant amount of particulate emissions and about a quarter of the world's emissions of black carbon comes from cooking equipment.

More information:

Kimmo Korhonen, University of Eastern Finland, tel. +358 45 8814252, kimmo.korhonen@uef.fi

Mika Komppula, Finnish Meteorological Institute, tel. +358 50 5207500, mika.komppula@fmi.fi

Korhonen, K., Kristensen, T. B., Falk, J., Lindgren, R., Andersen, C., Carvalho, R. L., Malmborg, V., Eriksson, A., Boman, C., Pagels, J., Svenningsson, B., Komppula, M., Lehtinen, K. E. J., and Virtanen, A.: Ice-nucleating ability of particulate emissions from solid-biomass-fired cookstoves: an experimental study, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 20, 4951–4968, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-4951-2020, 2020.

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