Rapid transformation of ambient absorbing aerosols from West African biomass burning

Abstract

Abstract. Seasonal biomass burning (BB) over West Africa is a globally significant source of carbonaceous particles in the atmosphere, which have important climate impacts but are poorly constrained. Here, the evolution of smoke aerosols emitted from flaming-controlled burning of agricultural waste and wooded savannah in the Senegal region was characterized over a timescale of half-day advection from the source during the MOYA-2017 (Methane Observation Yearly Assessment-2017) aircraft campaign. Plumes from such fire types are rich in black carbon (BC) emissions. Concurrent measurements of chemical composition, organic aerosol (OA) oxidation state, bulk aerosol size and BC mixing state reveal that emitted BB submicron aerosols changed dramatically with time. Various aerosol optical properties (e.g. absorption Ångström exponent – AAE – and mass absorption coefficients – MACs) also evolved with ageing. In this study, brown carbon (BrC) was a minor fractional component of the freshly emitted BB aerosols (< 0.5 h), but the increasing AAE with particle age indicates that BrC formation dominated over any loss process over the first ∼ 12 h of plume transport. Using different methods, the fractional contribution of BrC to total aerosol absorption showed an increasing trend with time and was ∼ 18 %–31 % at the optical wavelength of 405 nm after half-day transport. The generated BrC was found to be positively correlated with oxygenated and low-volatility OA, likely from the oxidation of evaporated primary OA and secondary OA formation. We found that the evolution of BrC with particle age was different in this region compared with previous BB field studies that mainly focused on emissions from smouldering fires, which have shown a high contribution from BrC at the source and BrC net loss upon ageing. This study suggests an initial stage of BrC absorption enhancement during the evolution of BB smoke. Secondary processing is the dominant contributor to BrC production in this BB region, in contrast to the primary emission of BrC previously reported in other BB studies. The total aerosol absorption normalized to BC mass (MACmeas-BC) was also enhanced with ageing due to the lensing effect of increasingly thick coatings on BC and the absorption by BrC. The effect of ageing on aerosol absorption, represented by the absorption enhancement (EAbs-MAC), was estimated over timescales of hours. MOYA-2017 provides novel field results. The comparisons between MOYA-2017 and previous field studies imply that the evolution of absorbing aerosols (BC and BrC) after emission varies with source combustion conditions. Different treatments of absorbing aerosol properties from different types of fires and their downwind evolution should be considered when modelling regional radiative forcing. These observational results will be very important for predicting climate effects of BB aerosol in regions controlled by flaming burning of agricultural waste and savannah-like biomass fuels.

Characteristics and Evolution of Brown Carbon in Western United States Wildfires

“…For relatively fresh smoke, Palm et al (2020) conclude that a balance between dilution-driven evaporation of primary wildfire smoke chromophores and formation of secondary BrC led to the observation in nine fire plumes of a near-constant level of light absorption by BrC for smoke up to at least 6 hours old. Wu et al (2021) found that smoke from West-African prescribed fires that started with minor levels of BrC, but were rich in BC, had continual increases in BrC with plume age for up to 12 hours. Studies tracking smoke over longer time scales have shown an overall loss of BrC, with a BrC characteristic lifetime (e.g., e-folding lifetime) ranging from ~10 hours to days (Forrister et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2016).…”

Ambient aerosol properties in the remote atmosphere from global-scale in situ measurements

“…The stratospheric aerosol layer contributes ∼ 0.005 to ∼ 0.01 to mid-visible AOD measured by AERONET (e.g., Yang, 2017) but not to that derived from the DC-8 profiles. The contribution of stratospheric AOD was determined using the Global Space-based Stratospheric Aerosol Climatology (GLOSSAC) v. 2.0 (NASA/LARC/SD/ASDC, 2018; Kovilakam et al, 2020).…”

Large Methane Emission Fluxes Observed From Tropical Wetlands in Zambia

“…Airborne measurements of CH 4 were recorded over Zambia in February 2019 as part of the Methane Observations and Yearly Assessments (MOYA; Barker et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2021) ZWAMPS field campaign. Three wetland areas were targeted across three separate flights; the Bangweulu wetland region in north-eastern Zambia (11°36' S, 30°05' E), the Kafue wetland in southern Zambia (15°43' S, 27°17' E), and the Lukanga wetland in central Zambia (14°29' S, 27°47' E) (Figure 1).…”