Abstract. Black carbon (BC) emission from biofuel cooking in South Asia and its radiative forcing is a significant source of uncertainty for health and climate impact studies. Quantification of BC emissions in the published literature is either based on laboratory or remote field observations far away from the source. For the first time under Project Surya, we use field measurements taken simultaneously inside rural households, ambient air and vehicular emissions from highways in a rural area in the Indo-Gangetic-Plains region of India to establish the role of both solid biomass based cooking in traditional stoves and diesel vehicles in contributing to high BC and organic carbon (OC), and solar absorption. The major finding of this study is that BC concentrations during cooking hours, both indoors and outdoors, have anomalously large twice-daily peak concentrations reaching 60 µg m −3 (median 15-min average value) for indoor and 30 µg m −3 (median 15-min average value) for outdoor during the early morning (05:00 to 08:00) and early evening (17:00 to 19:00) hours coinciding with the morning and evening cooking hours. The BC during the non-cooking hours were also large, in the range of 2 to 30 µg m −3 . The peak indoor BC concentrations reached as high as 1000 µg m −3 . The large diurnal peaks seen in this study lead to the conclusion that satellite based aerosol studies that rely on once-daily daytime measurements may severely underestimate the BC loading of the atmosphere. The concentration of OC was a factor of 5 larger than BC and furthermore optical data show that absorbing brown carbon was a major component of the OC. The imprint of the cooking hour peaks were seen in the outdoor BC both in the village as well as in the highway. The results have significant implications for climate and epidemiological studies.
Abstract. Project Surya has documented indoor and outdoor concentrations of black carbon (BC) from traditional biomass burning cook stoves in a rural village located in the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) region of N. India from November 2009-September 2010. In this paper, we systematically document the link between local scale aerosol properties and column averaged regional aerosol optical properties and atmospheric radiative forcing. We document observations from the first phase of Project Surya and estimate the source dependent (biomass and fossil fuels) aerosol optical properties from local to regional scale. Data were collected using surface based observations of BC, organic carbon (OC), aerosol light absorption, scattering coefficient at the Surya village (SVI 1) located in IGP region and integrated with satellite and AERONET observations at the regional scale (IGP). The daily mean BC concentrations at SVI 1 showed a large increase of BC during the dry season (December to February) with values reaching 35 µg m −3 . Space based LIDAR data revealed how the biomass smoke was trapped within the first kilometer during the dry season and extended to above 5 km during the pre-monsoon season. As a result, during the dry season, the variance in the daily mean single scattering albedo (SSA), the ratio of scattering to extinction coefficient, and column aerosol optical properties at the local IGP site correlated (with slopes in the range of 0.85 to 1.06 and R 2 > 0.4) well with the "IGP AERONET" (mean of six AERONET sites). The statistically significant correlation suggested that in-situ observations can be used to derive spatial mean forcing, at least for the dry season. The atmospheric forcing due to BC and OC exceeded 20 Wm −2 during all months from November to May, supporting the deduction that elimination of cook stove smoke emissions through clean cooking technologies will likely have a major positive impact not only on human health but also on regional climate.
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