Insights into the aging of biomass burning aerosol from satellite observations and 3D atmospheric modeling: Evolution of the aerosol optical properties in Siberian wildfire plumes

• Main Authors: Konovalov, Igor, Golovushkin, Nikolai, Beekmann, Matthias, Andreae, Meinrat
• Other Authors: Institute of Applied Physics of RAS, Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow (RAS), Laboratoire Interuniversitaire des Systèmes Atmosphériques (LISA (UMR_7583)), Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Université Paris-Est Créteil Val-de-Marne - Paris 12 (UPEC UP12)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Paris Cité (UPCité), Biogeochemistry Division, Max-Planck-Institut
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2020
• Subjects: [SDE]Environmental Sciences; Arctic; albedo
• Online Access: https://hal.science/hal-03032163; https://hal.science/hal-03032163/document; https://hal.science/hal-03032163/file/acp-2020-591_Konovalov_discussion.pdf; https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2020-591

International audience Long-range transport of biomass burning (BB) aerosol from regions affected by wildfires is known to have a significant impact on the radiative balance and air quality in receptor regions, including the Arctic. However, the atmospheric evolution of the optical properties of BB aerosol during the long-range transport events is insufficiently understood, limiting the adequacy of representations of the aerosol processes in chemistry transport and climate models. Here we introduce a framework to infer and interpret changes of the optical properties of BB aerosol from satellite observations of multiple BB plumes. Our framework includes (1) a procedure for analysis of available satellite retrievals of the absorption and extinction aerosol optical depths (AAOD and AOD) and single scattering albedo (SSA) as a function of the BB aerosol photochemical age, and (2) a representation of the AAOD and AOD evolution with a chemistry transport model (CTM) involving a simpli