Brown carbon's emission factors and optical characteristics in household biomass burning: developing a novel algorithm for estimating the contribution of brown carbon

Sun, Jianzhong; Zhang, Yuzhe; Zhi, Guorui; Hitzenberger, Regina; Jin, Wenjing; Chen, Yingjun; Wang, Lei; Tian, Chongguo; Li, Zhengying; Chen, Rong; Xiao, Wen; Cheng, Yuan; Yang, Wei; Yao, Liying; Cao, Yang; Huang, Duo; Qiu, Yueyuan; Xu, Jiali; Xia, Xiaofei; Yang, Xin; Zhang, Xi; Zong, Zheng; Song, Yuchun; Wu, Changdong

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-2329-2021

Articles | Volume 21, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-2329-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-2329-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 4

Research article

|

17 Feb 2021

Research article |

| 17 Feb 2021

Brown carbon's emission factors and optical characteristics in household biomass burning: developing a novel algorithm for estimating the contribution of brown carbon

Jianzhong Sun, Yuzhe Zhang, Guorui Zhi, Regina Hitzenberger, Wenjing Jin, Yingjun Chen, Lei Wang, Chongguo Tian, Zhengying Li, Rong Chen, Wen Xiao, Yuan Cheng, Wei Yang, Liying Yao, Yang Cao, Duo Huang, Yueyuan Qiu, Jiali Xu, Xiaofei Xia, Xin Yang, Xi Zhang, Zheng Zong, Yuchun Song, and Changdong Wu

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Preprint (discussion started on 23 Jul 2020)
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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Comments to acp-2020-548', Anonymous Referee #1, 13 Aug 2020
- AC1: 'Response to Referee #1 and #2', Jianzhong Sun, 29 Oct 2020
RC2: 'review report', Anonymous Referee #2, 25 Aug 2020
- AC2: 'Response to Referee #2', Jianzhong Sun, 29 Oct 2020
- AC1: 'Response to Referee #1 and #2', Jianzhong Sun, 29 Oct 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Jianzhong Sun on behalf of the Authors (12 Nov 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (17 Nov 2020) by Sergey A. Nizkorodov

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (28 Nov 2020)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (03 Dec 2020)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (05 Dec 2020) by Sergey A. Nizkorodov

Please address remaining suggestions by Reviewer 1. In addition, here my remaining comments after reading the final version of your manuscript:

EDITORIAL REVIEW:

L343: the 4 points in figure 5 fall on a straight line. I am curious why you elect to complicate the fit by using a logarithmic function? If you insist on using logarithmic fit you need to provide a theoretical justification for it. If there is no theoretical reason, and the fit is purely empirical, using the simplest possible function is better.

Table 1: Some digits can be cut from numbers without loss of information. For example, 2.50 +/- 3.064 can be replaced by 2.50 ± 3.06 as there is no reason to specify error in the digit that is not even listed. Same for 1.25 +/- 0.074, 1.51 +/- 0.389, etc.
As I mentioned in the initial review, your EF error for rape straw is unphysically small leading to unnecessarily precise EFs reported here. I am pretty sure that using more conservative measurements uncertainties would increase the reported error, perhaps from 0.002 to more than 0.01 (allowing you to cut one significant digit out). Are you comfortable reporting an emission factor with 4 significant digits when the rest of them have 2-3?

L118: comment: use of alcohol presumably makes MCE higher than it would have been without it. Should it be mentioned?

L206: This is an important practical recommendation from your study, and if this is not widely known it may be worth inserting a sentence about the benefits of biomass briquetting in the abstract.

TECHNICAL CORRECTIONS:

L11: geomean -> geometric mean (also make this change in other places in the text such as Table 1)

L92: Eleven biomass fuels were tested: they were classified into three groups, i.e. crop -> Eleven biomass fuels tested in this work were classified into three groups: crop

L111: 93.86 ± 5.93% -> 93.9 ± 5.9%,

L141: (e.g. Acros -> (Acros

L154: not fully perfect -> not perfect

L221: aids to compare -> compares

L274: are collated and arranged in a scatter plot (Figure 2) -> are collated and arranged in a scatter plot in Figure 2

L327: logarithmical -> linear

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AR by Jianzhong Sun on behalf of the Authors (20 Dec 2020) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (22 Dec 2020) by Sergey A. Nizkorodov

AR by Jianzhong Sun on behalf of the Authors (27 Dec 2020)

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Short summary

Brown carbon (BrC) emission factors from household biomass fuels were measured with an integrating sphere optics approach supported by iterative calculations. A novel algorithm to directly estimate the absorption contribution of BrC relative to that of BrC + black carbon (FBrC) was proposed based purely on the absorption exponent (AAE) (FBrC = 0.5519 lnAAE + 0.0067). The FBrC for household biomass fuels was as high as 50.8 % across the strongest solar spectral range of 350−850 nm.