Journal article
Global-scale seasonally resolved black carbon vertical profiles over the Pacific
- Abstract:
- Black carbon (BC) aerosol loadings were measured during the High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) campaign above the remote Pacific from 85°N to 67°S. Over 700 vertical profiles extending from near the surface to max ∼14 km altitude were obtained with a single-particle soot photometer between early 2009 and mid-2011. The data provides a climatology of BC in the remote regions that reveals gradients of BC concentration reflecting global-scale transport and removal of pollution. BC is identified as a sensitive tracer of extratropical mixing into the lower tropical tropopause layer and trends toward surprisingly uniform loadings in the lower stratosphere of ∼1 ng/kg. The climatology is compared to predictions from the AeroCom global model intercomparison initiative. The AeroCom model suite overestimates loads in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere (∼10×) more severely than at lower altitudes (∼3×), with bias roughly independent of season or geographic location; these results indicate that it overestimates BC lifetime. Key Points A BC climatology is provided for the remote Pacific and Polar regions AeroCom overestimates remote BC with strong altitude dependence Extratropical mixing into the TTL is estimated from BC latitudinal gradients ©2013 The Authors. Geophysical Research Letters published by Wiley on behalf of the American Geophysical Union.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
+ Natural Environment Research Council
More from this funder
- Funding agency for:
- Stier, P
- Grant:
- NE/J022624/1
- Publisher:
- John Wiley and Sons
- Journal:
- GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS More from this journal
- Volume:
- 40
- Issue:
- 20
- Pages:
- 5542-5547
- Publication date:
- 2013-10-28
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1944-8007
- ISSN:
-
0094-8276
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Subjects:
- Pubs id:
-
pubs:436771
- UUID:
-
uuid:a7e936a0-34f9-4cf8-9551-088486018fbc
- Local pid:
-
pubs:436771
- Source identifiers:
-
436771
- Deposit date:
-
2014-03-03
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- JP Schwarz et al
- Copyright date:
- 2013
- Notes:
- ©2013 J.P. Schwarz et al. Geophysical Research Letters published by Wiley on behalf of the American Geophysical Union. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record