TY - JOUR
T1 - Revised historical Northern Hemisphere black carbon emissions based on inverse modeling of ice core records
AU - Eckhardt, Sabine
AU - Pisso, Ignacio
AU - Evangeliou, Nikolaos
AU - Zwaaftink, Christine Groot
AU - Plach, Andreas
AU - McConnell, Joseph R.
AU - Sigl, Michael
AU - Ruppel, Meri
AU - Zdanowicz, Christian
AU - Lim, Saehee
AU - Chellman, Nathan
AU - Opel, Thomas
AU - Meyer, Hanno
AU - Steffensen, Jørgen Peder
AU - Schwikowski, Margit
AU - Stohl, Andreas
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).
PY - 2023/1/17
Y1 - 2023/1/17
N2 - Black carbon emitted by incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass has a net warming effect in the atmosphere and reduces the albedo when deposited on ice and snow; accurate knowledge of past emissions is essential to quantify and model associated global climate forcing. Although bottom-up inventories provide historical Black Carbon emission estimates that are widely used in Earth System Models, they are poorly constrained by observations prior to the late 20th century. Here we use an objective inversion technique based on detailed atmospheric transport and deposition modeling to reconstruct 1850 to 2000 emissions from thirteen Northern Hemisphere ice-core records. We find substantial discrepancies between reconstructed Black Carbon emissions and existing bottom-up inventories which do not fully capture the complex spatial-temporal emission patterns. Our findings imply changes to existing historical Black Carbon radiative forcing estimates are necessary, with potential implications for observation-constrained climate sensitivity.
AB - Black carbon emitted by incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass has a net warming effect in the atmosphere and reduces the albedo when deposited on ice and snow; accurate knowledge of past emissions is essential to quantify and model associated global climate forcing. Although bottom-up inventories provide historical Black Carbon emission estimates that are widely used in Earth System Models, they are poorly constrained by observations prior to the late 20th century. Here we use an objective inversion technique based on detailed atmospheric transport and deposition modeling to reconstruct 1850 to 2000 emissions from thirteen Northern Hemisphere ice-core records. We find substantial discrepancies between reconstructed Black Carbon emissions and existing bottom-up inventories which do not fully capture the complex spatial-temporal emission patterns. Our findings imply changes to existing historical Black Carbon radiative forcing estimates are necessary, with potential implications for observation-constrained climate sensitivity.
U2 - 10.1038/s41467-022-35660-0
DO - 10.1038/s41467-022-35660-0
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 36650124
AN - SCOPUS:85146401054
VL - 14
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
SN - 2041-1723
IS - 1
M1 - 271
ER -