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Black Carbon and Inorganic Aerosols in Arctic Snowpack
Author(s) -
Mori Tatsuhiro,
GotoAzuma Kumiko,
Kondo Yutaka,
OgawaTsukagawa Yoshimi,
Miura Kazuhiko,
Hirabayashi Motohiro,
Oshima Naga,
Koike Makoto,
Kupiainen Kaarle,
Moteki Nobuhiro,
Ohata Sho,
Sinha P.R.,
Sugiura Konosuke,
Aoki Teruo,
Schneebeli Martin,
Steffen Konrad,
Sato Atsushi,
Tsushima Akane,
Makarov Vladimir,
Omiya Satoshi,
Sugimoto Atsuko,
Takano Shinya,
Nagatsuka Naoko
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: atmospheres
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2169-8996
pISSN - 2169-897X
DOI - 10.1029/2019jd030623
Subject(s) - snowpack , snow , environmental science , atmospheric sciences , mineral dust , radiative forcing , aerosol , arctic , oceanography , geography , meteorology , geology
Black carbon (BC) deposited on snow lowers its albedo, potentially contributing to warming in the Arctic. Atmospheric distributions of BC and inorganic aerosols, which contribute directly and indirectly to radiative forcing, are also greatly influenced by depositions. To quantify these effects, accurate measurement of the spatial distributions of BC and ionic species representative of inorganic aerosols (ionic species hereafter) in snowpack in various regions of the Arctic is needed, but few such measurements are available. We measured mass concentrations of size‐resolved BC ( C MBC ) and ionic species in snowpack by using a single‐particle soot photometer and ion chromatography, respectively, over Finland, Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, and Spitsbergen during early spring in 2012–2016. Total BC mass deposited per unit area (DEP MBC ) during snow accumulation periods was derived from C MBC and snow water equivalent (SWE). Our analyses showed that the spatial distributions of anthropogenic BC emission flux, total precipitable water, and topography strongly influenced latitudinal variations of C MBC , BC size distributions, SWE, and DEP MBC . The average size distributions of BC in Arctic snowpack shifted to smaller sizes with decreasing C MBC due to an increase in the removal efficiency of larger BC particles during transport from major sources. Our measurements of C MBC were lower by a factor of ~13 than previous measurements made with an Integrating Sphere/Integrating Sandwich spectrophotometer due mainly to interference from coexisting non‐BC particles such as mineral dust. The SP2 data presented here will be useful for constraining climate models that estimate the effects of BC on the Arctic climate.