Emission characteristics of black carbon in anthropogenic and biomass burning plumes over California during ARCTAS‐CARB 2008

Abstract

[1] The impact of aerosols on regional air quality and climate necessitates improved understanding of their emission and microphysical properties. The size distributions of black carbon (BC) and light scattering particles (LSP) were measured with a single particle soot photometer on board the NASA DC-8 aircraft during the ARCTAS mission 2008. Air sampling was made in the air plumes of both urban and forest fire emissions over California during the CARB (California Air Resources Board) phase of the mission. A total of eleven plumes were identified using SO 2 and CH 3 CN tracers for fossil fuel (FF) combustion and biomass burning (BB), respectively. The enhancements of BC and LSP in BB plumes were significantly higher compared to those in FF plumes. The average mass concentration of BC in BB plumes was more than twice that in FF plumes. Except for the BC/CO ratio, distinct emission ratios of BC/CO 2 , BC/CH 3 CN, CH 3 CN/CO, and CO/CO 2 were observed in the plumes from the two sources. Similarly, the microphysical properties of BC and LSP also showed distinct behaviors. The BC count median diameter (CMD) of 115 AE 5 nm in FF plumes was smaller compared to 141 AE 9 nm in the BB plumes. BC aerosols were thickly coated in BB plumes, the average shell/core ratios were 1.47 and 1.24 in BB and FF plumes, respectively. In the total mass of submicron aerosols, organic aerosols constituted about 67% in the FF plumes and 84% in BB plumes. The contribution of sulfate was also significant in the FF plumes.

Black carbon aerosol in winter northeastern Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau, China: the source, mixing state and optical property

“…The coagulation of particles in ambient air is dominated by Brownian motion, a slow process for particles in the accumulation mode (Seinfeld and Pandis, 1998). Therefore, the similarity in VED size distribution for the rBC core between clean days and the pollution episode indicates that the measured rBC particles are likely from biomass burning emissions, given that fossil fuel and biomass burning tend to have different rBC size distributions and that the peak diameter measured in this study is similar to the reported rBC peak diameter from biomass burning plumes (range ∼ 187-193 nm; see Kondo et al, 2011;Sahu et al, 2012;Taylor et al, 2014).…”

Four-dimensional variational inversion of black carbon emissions during ARCTAS-CARB with WRFDA-Chem

“…YUTAKA/. (Sahu et al, 2012). Total elemental carbon mass measurements taken by thermal optical reflectance at IMPROVE network sites are available at http://views.cira.colostate.edu/fed/ DataWizard/Default.aspx (Malm et al, 1994).…”

“…We utilize aircraft measurements of absorbing carbonaceous aerosol at 10 s intervals from the single-particle soot photometer (SP2) on 22, 24, and 26 June (Sahu et al, 2012). For this study, we assume equivalency between the SP2 measurement and modeled BC, and re-average to the 90 s model time step using the revision 3 product, a process described in Guerrette and Henze (2015).…”

“…In June 2008, ARCTAS-CARB characterized aerosols and trace gases throughout California with DC-8 aircraft flights on 20 (Friday), 22 (Sunday), 24 (Tuesday), and 26 (Wednesday) June (Jacob et al, 2010). Sahu et al (2012) used BC total mass measurements from a singleparticle soot photometer (SP2) and other simultaneous gasphase measurements to identify and characterize anthropogenic and BB plumes in California. By using these observations and surface measurements from every third day from the Interagency Monitoring of PROtected Visual Environment (IMPROVE) network (Malm et al, 1994), we provide top-down estimates of BC surface fluxes using 4D-Var.…”

Near-field emission profiling of tropical forest and Cerrado fires in Brazil during SAMBBA 2012

“…Figure 3. Mass fraction of aerosol components as a percentage of total aerosol mass including black carbon, organic aerosol, chloride, ammonium, sulfate and nitrate for the Rondônia fire and Tocantins fires, as well as values for previous studies from the Yucatán , Brazil (Ferek et al, 1998), California (Sahu et al, 2012) and North America (Kondo et al, 2011). Table 4.…”