AAAR 37th Annual Conference October 14 - October 18, 2019 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
What Matters for the Climate Impact of Biomass Burning Smoke
DANIEL MURPHY, NOAA ESRL
Abstract Number: 306 Working Group: Biomass Combustion: Emissions, Chemistry, Air Quality, Climate, and Human Health
Abstract Biomass burning smoke is one of the largest and most diverse sources of aerosol in the atmosphere. I will provide an overview of how the radiative properties of smoke affect climate. If there is one message it is that simple radiative transfer calculations do not capture the climate impact of black or brown carbon. The concept of “adjusted radiative forcing” is crucial to understanding the climate impact of smoke. Even the sign can change: in some locations black carbon cools the Earth. Smoke is neither purely scattering nor black, it has multiple light-absorbing species, and is often injected above the surface. Each of these properties of smoke can have important implications for the radiative impacts. For example, altitude affects the radiative impact of an absorbing aerosol much more than it affects a purely scattering aerosol. That implies that the same smoke, containing both scattering and absorbing aerosol, can be net cooling if it is at one altitude and net warming at another.