Source-explicit estimation of brown carbon in the polluted atmosphere over the North China Plain: implications for distribution, absorption, and the direct radiative effect

Zhou, Jiamao; Wu, Jiarui; Su, Xiaoli; Wang, Ruonan; EI Haddad, Imad; Li, Xia; Jiang, Qian; Zhang, Ting; Dai, Wenting; Cao, Junji; Prevot, Andre S. H.; Tie, Xuexi; Li, Guohui

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-7563-2025

Articles | Volume 25, issue 14

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-7563-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-7563-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 25, issue 14

Research article

|

18 Jul 2025

Research article |

| 18 Jul 2025

Source-explicit estimation of brown carbon in the polluted atmosphere over the North China Plain: implications for distribution, absorption, and the direct radiative effect

Jiamao Zhou, Jiarui Wu, Xiaoli Su, Ruonan Wang, Imad EI Haddad, Xia Li, Qian Jiang, Ting Zhang, Wenting Dai, Junji Cao, Andre S. H. Prevot, Xuexi Tie, and Guohui Li

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-25-7563-2025-supplement

Data sets

OMI/Aura Multi-wavelength Aerosol Optical Depth and Single Scattering Albedo L3 1 day Best Pixel in 0.25 degree x 0.25 degree V3 D. Stein-Zweers and P. Veefkind https://doi.org/10.5067/Aura/OMI/DATA3004

LGHAP: the Long-term Gap-free High-resolution Air Pollutant concentration dataset, derived via tensor-flow-based multimodal data fusion (10.12041/geodata.1776940.ver1.db) K. Bai et al. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-907-2022

National Urban Air Quality Real-time Release Platform China Environmental Monitoring Centre https://air.cnemc.cn:18007/

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Short summary

Brown carbon (BrC) is a type of airborne particle produced from various combustion sources which is light absorption. Historically, climate models have categorizing organic particles as either non-absorbing or purely reflective. Our study shows that BrC can reduce the usual cooling effect of organic particles. While BrC is often linked to biomass burning, however, BrC from fossil fuels contributes significantly to atmospheric heating.