Siberian Arctic black carbon sources constrained by model and observation

• Published in: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Main Authors: Winiger, Patrik, Andersson, August, Eckhardt, Sabine, Stohl, Andreas, Semiletov, Igor P., Dudarev, Oleg V., Charkin, Alexander, Shakhova, Natalia, Klimont, Zbigniew, Heyes, Chris, Gustafsson, Örjan
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: National Academy of Sciences 2017
• Subjects: PNAS Plus; Arctic; black carbon
• Online Access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5320976/; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28137854; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1613401114

A successful mitigation strategy for climate warming agents such as black carbon (BC) requires reliable source information from bottom-up emission inventory data, which can only be verified by observation. We measured BC in one of the fastest-warming and, at the same time, substantially understudied regions on our planet, the northeastern Siberian Arctic. Our observations, compared with an atmospheric transport model, imply that quantification and spatial allocation of emissions at high latitudes, specifically in the Russian Arctic, need improvement by reallocating emissions and significantly shifting source contributions for the transport, domestic, power plant, and gas flaring sectors. This strong shift in reported emissions has potentially considerable implications for climate modeling and BC mitigation efforts.