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Impurities in Snow and its Radiative Forcing over the Arctic and Northern China. Objective To understand the sensitivity and uncertainty of light absorbing aerosols deposition and the snow-melting process in current Earth system models.
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Impurities in Snow and its Radiative Forcing over the Arctic and Northern China Objective • To understand the sensitivity and uncertainty of light absorbing aerosols deposition and the snow-melting process in current Earth system models Sensitivities of black carbon in snow concentration (top) and radiative forcing (bottom) to uncertain parameters. • Approach • Evaluate simulated black carbon (BC) in snow against measurements from multiple field campaigns over the Arctic and Northern China • Conduct sensitivity experiments in CAM5 to examine the impacts of snow-aging and melt-water scavenging (MSE) efficiency on snow-melting and radiative forcing of BC • Compare BC deposition uncertainty with that related to the treatment of snow-aging and melt-water scavenging for BC Impact • Improvements in atmospheric BC transport and deposition significantly reduce the biases (by a factor of two) in the estimation of BC concentration over both Northern China and the Arctic • Melt-water scavenging efficiency parameter found to play important role in regulating BC concentrations and radiative forcing. Qian Y, H Wang, R Zhang, M Flanner, and PJ Rasch. 2014. “A Sensitivity Study on Modeling the Black Carbon in Snow and its Radiative Forcing over the Arctic and Northern China.” Environmental Research Letters 9(6):064001. DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/9/6/064001