Origin of elemental carbon in snow from western Siberia and northwestern European Russia during winter-spring 2014, 2015 and 2016

• Published in: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics
• Main Authors: Shevchenko, Vladimir P., Yttri, Karl Espen, Eckhardt, Sabine, Sollum, Espen, Pokrovsky, Oleg S., Kobelev, Vasily O., Korobov, Vladimir B., Lobanov, Andrey A., Starodymova, Dina P., Vorobyev, Sergey N. (биолог), Thompson, Rona L., Evangeliou, Nikolaos, Stohl, Andreas
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Западная Сибирь; Северо-Запад Европейской России; черный углерод; снег; Arctic; black carbon; Human health; Siberia
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-18-963-2018; http://vital.lib.tsu.ru/vital/access/manager/Repository/vtls:000653315

Short-lived climate forcers have been proven important both for the climate and human health. In particular, black carbon (BC) is an important climate forcer both as an aerosol and when deposited on snow and ice surface because of its strong light absorption. This paper presents measurements of elemental carbon (EC; a measurement-based definition of BC) in snow collected from western Siberia and northwestern European Russia during 2014, 2015 and 2016. The Russian Arctic is of great interest to the scientific community due to the large uncertainty of emission sources there. We have determined the major contributing sources of BC in snow in western Siberia and northwestern European Russia using a Lagrangian atmospheric transport model. For the first time, we use a recently developed feature that calculates deposition in backward (so-called retroplume) simulations allowing estimation of the specific locations of sources that contribute to the deposited mass.