Investigating the role of air mass history of Arctic black carbon in GCMs
- 1Department of Environmental Science, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden (cremer@tropos.de)
- 2Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research, Leipzig, Germany
- 3Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
- 4Met Office, Exeter, UK
- 5ECMWF, Reading, RG2 9AX, UK
- 6Finnish Meteorological Institute, Climate Research Program, Helsinki, Finland
- 7Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
- 8Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
- 9Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Black Carbon (BC) aerosols are known to be important for the Earth’s climate, yet their exact role to the changing of the Earth’s climate and Arctic amplification remains unclear. An accurate description of the BC life cycle in general circulation models (GCMs) can help reduce the uncertainties due to BC aerosols and specify BC's role in the Arctic.
In this study, several GCMs (ECHAM6.3-HAM2.3, ECHAM6.3-HAM2.3-P3, ECHAM6.3-HAM2.3-SALSA2 and UKESM1.0) are compared in terms of their representation of BC mass in the Arctic within the AeroCom project GCM Trajectory. A novel Lagrangian framework is employed to examine the history of air masses reaching the observational station Zeppelin, Svalbard. Therfore the removal processes were analysed along the trajectory and the GCMs compared with each other. The analysis emphasises the impact of remote emissions on local BC concentrations in the Arctic, indicating a longer BC lifetime compared to the global average. This underlines the importance of dry and wet scavenging parametrisations in the GCMs.
How to cite: Cremer, R. S., Kim, P., Blichner, S. M., Tovazzi, E., Johnson, B., Kipling, Z., Kühn, T., Watson-Parris, D., Neubauer, D., Stier, P., Sellar, A., Holopainen, E., Riipinen, I., and Partridge, D. G.: Investigating the role of air mass history of Arctic black carbon in GCMs, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-18277, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-18277, 2024.
