Large historical changes of fossil-fuel black carbon aerosols

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Read Full Article (file size: 274558 bytes) Cited by GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 30, NO. 6, 1324, doi:10.1029/2002GL016345, 2003 Large historical changes of fossil-fuel black carbon aerosols T. Novakov Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA V. Ramanathan Center for Atmospheric Sciences, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA J. E. Hansen NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York, USA T. W. Kirchstetter Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA M. Sato NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York, USA J. E. Sinton Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA J. A. Sathaye Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA Abstract Anthropogenic emissions of fine black carbon (BC) particles, the principal light-absorbing atmospheric aerosol, have varied during the past century in response to changes of fossil-fuel utilization, technology developments, and emission controls. We estimate historical trends of fossil-fuel BC emissions in six regions that represent about two-thirds of present day emissions and extrapolate these to global emissions from 1875 onward. Qualitative features in these trends show rapid increase in the latter part of the 1800s, the leveling off in the first half of the 1900s, and the re-acceleration in the past 50 years as China and India developed. We find that historical changes of fuel utilization have caused large temporal change in aerosol absorption, and thus substantial change of aerosol single scatter albedo in some regions, which suggests that BC may have contributed to global temperature changes in the past century. This implies that the BC history needs to be represented realistically in climate change assessments. Published 26 March 2003. Index Terms: 0305 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Aerosols and particles (0345, 4801); 0322 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Constituent sources and sinks; 0345 Atmospheric Composition and Structure: Pollution—urban and regional (0305). Read Full Article (file size: 274558 bytes) Cited by Citation: Novakov, T., V. Ramanathan, J. E. Hansen, T. W. Kirchstetter, M. Sato, J. E. Sinton, and J. A. Sathaye (2003), Large historical changes of fossil-fuel black carbon aerosols, Geophys. Res. Lett., 30(6), 1324, doi:10.1029/2002GL016345. Copyright 2003 by the American Geophysical Union.

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