Particle-size-dependent aging time scale of atmospheric black carbon

입자 크기의 함수로 나타낸 대기 중 블랙카본의 변성시간척도

Black carbon, which is a by-product of combustion of fossil fuel and biomass burning, is the component that imposes the largest uncertainty on quantifying aerosol climate effect. The direct, indirect and semi-direct climate effects of black carbon depend on its state of the mixing with other water-soluble aerosol components. The process that transforms hydrophobic externally mixed black carbon particles into hygroscopic internally mixed ones is called "aging". In most climate models, simple parameterizations for the aging time scale are used instead of solving detailed dynamics equations on the aging process due to the computation cost. In this study, a new parameterization for the black carbon aging time scale due to condensation and coagulation is presented as a function of the concentration of hygroscopic atmospheric components and the black carbon particle size. It is shown that the black carbon aging time scale due to condensation of sulfuric acid vapors varies to a large extent depending on the sulfuric acid concentration and the black carbon particle size. This result indicates that the constant aging time scale values suggested in the literature cannot be directly applied to a global scale modeling. The aging time scale due to coagulation with internally mixed aerosol particles shows an even stronger dependency on particle size, which implies that the use of a particle-size-independent aging time scale may lead to a large error when the aging is dominated by coagulation.