Assessment of the Spatial Structure of Black Carbon Concentrations in the Near-Surface Arctic Atmosphere

Abstract

The results of the research are numerical estimates of the average fields of black carbon mass concentration in the surface layer of the atmosphere of the Arctic region obtained using the numeric technology referred to as fluid location of the atmosphere (FLA). The modelling has been based on measurements of the black carbon concentrations in the near-surface atmosphere obtained during the two cruises of the Professor Multanovskiy (28 July–7 September 2019) and Akademik Mstislav Keldysh (31 July–24 August 2020) research vessels. These measurements have been supplemented by measurements at stationary monitoring points located on the Spitsbergen and the Severnaya Zemlya archipelagoes. The simulation in the summertime demonstrates that areas of increased black carbon concentrations were observed over Northern Europe and, in 2019, also over the Laptev Sea basin. The obtained spatial distribution of mass concentrations of black carbon qualitatively agreed with the same data derived from the second Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2) but showed quantitative differences. The average values of mass concentrations of black carbon in the modelling zones are as follows: 85.3 ng/m3 (2019) and 53.6 ng/m3 (2020) for fields reconstructed by the FLA technology; and 261.69 ng/m3 (2019) and 131.8 ng/m3 (2020) for the MERRA-2 data.

Application of satellite measurements for the atmospheric aerosol field assessment by the method of fluid-location of the atmosphere

“…The original version of the FLA method used the results of measurements of atmospheric impurities at one or several stationary monitoring point. Then the version modified to consider the results of measurements of a mobile monitoring station of the FLA method was used to estimate the average fields of the mass concentration of black carbon in the surface atmospheric layer of the Arctic region 5 .…”

A Regional Aerosol Model for the Middle Urals Based on CALIPSO Measurements

“…With this approach, it is possible to estimate the spatial distribution of surface aerosol concentrations based on remote satellite sensing of the atmosphere in the studied region [15][16][17]. Another approach to estimating aerosol spatial distribution is to use methods relying on the information about the atmosphere dynamics [18,19]. However, these approaches fail to estimate the vertical distribution of aerosol in the atmosphere.…”