The impact of uncertainty in black carbon's refractive index on simulated optical depth and radiative forcing

Ruth A. R. Digby, Knut von Salzen, Adam H. Monahan, Nathan P. Gillett, and Jiangnan Li

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Jul 2024	111	25	13	149
Aug 2024	76	25	7	108
Sep 2024	41	11	4	56
Oct 2024	22	4	1	27
Nov 2024	17	2	1	20
Dec 2024	50	36	2	88
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Feb 2025	17	1	0	18
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Cumulative views and downloads (calculated since 17 Jul 2024)

Month	HTML	PDF	XML	Total
Jul 2024	111	25	13	149
Aug 2024	76	25	7	108
Sep 2024	41	11	4	56
Oct 2024	22	4	1	27
Nov 2024	17	2	1	20
Dec 2024	50	36	2	88
Jan 2025	11	7	1	19
Feb 2025	17	1	0	18
Mar 2025	3	3	0	6

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Total article views: 491 (including HTML, PDF, and XML) Thereof 491 with geography defined and 0 with unknown origin.

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Latest update: 14 Mar 2025

Short summary

The refractive index of black carbon (BCRI), which determines how much energy black carbon absorbs and scatters, is difficult to measure, and different climate models use different values. We show that varying the BCRI across commonly used values can increase absorbing aerosol optical depth by 42 % and the warming effect from interactions between black carbon and radiation by 47 %, an appreciable fraction of the overall spread between models reported in recent literature assessments.