| Summary: | International audience Arctic air pollution originates mainly from long-range transport of short-lived climate forcers (SLCFs), including black carbon(BC), ozone, and their precursors, from mid-latitudes and, also from important local anthropogenic emissions from activities suchas resource extraction, shipping and domestic combustion. Russia’s location closer to the Arctic leads to more significantcontributions from local anthropogenic emissions to levels of Arctic air pollution, especially BC from oil/gas extraction activities.However, large uncertainties exist about the magnitude and temporal/spatial variations of BC emissions and their contribution toArctic BC loading. In this study, we focus on a better understanding of BC emissions from gas flaring hot spots in the Yamal-Nenets regions of northern Russia by using WRF-Chem simulations with improved BC emissions estimated from radiometerscanning night-light imaging from satellite data. For this study, we convert VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite)12-hourly heat radiances (Elvidge et al. 2016) from Russian gas/oil flaring hot spots into daily BC emission, by using correlationswith 0.025 degree annual BC emissions derived from Sea and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) GFlaringS3 data(Caseiro et al. 2020). We analyze the origins of polluted air masses sampled during French (CNRS)-Russian YAK-AEROSIBflights over the Ob Valley, Yamal and Kara Sea regions during October 2014 using BC tracers run in WRF-Chem. Fullchemistry-aerosol simulations of WRF-Chem, run with SAPRC-MOSAIC and ECLIPSE-v6b anthropogenic emissions, are usedto examine the sensitivity of simulated BC to gas flaring emissions. BC emissions from the flaring sector are replaced withemissions derived from VIIRS data. Sensitivity runs with daily varying and annual average BC are also performed to examine theimpacts of temporal variations in flaring activities on Arctic BC
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