Summary of Organic and Elemental Carbon/Black Carbon Analysis Methods and Intercomparisons
TLDR
Many different thermal, optical, and thermal/optical carbon analysis methods for organic carbon (OC), elemental carbon (EC) or black carbon (BC) have been applied throughout the world to evaluate visibility and the Earth's radiation balance as mentioned in this paper.Abstract:
Many different thermal, optical, and thermal/optical carbon analysis methods for organic carbon (OC), elemental carbon (EC) or black carbon (BC) have been applied throughout the world to evaluate visibility and the Earth’s radiation balance. Dozens of intermethod and interlaboratory comparison studies have been conducted. Several of these studies are catalogued and summarized here. BC or EC concentrations are found to differ by up to a factor of 7 among different methods; factor of 2 differences are common. Differences between methods are not consistent among comparison studies, with some methods showing higher BC for one set of samples and lower BC for other sets relative to a common benchmark. The absorption efficiency relating light absorption (babs) to EC that is derived from collocated optical and chemical measurements can vary by a factor of 10, depending on the collocated babs and EC measurement methods. Future intermethod and interlaboratory comparisons must include components that seek to understand the causes of these differences.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Bounding the role of black carbon in the climate system: A scientific assessment
Tami C. Bond,Sarah J. Doherty,David W. Fahey,Piers M. Forster,Terje Koren Berntsen,Benjamin DeAngelo,Mark Flanner,Steven J. Ghan,Bernd Kärcher,Dorothy Koch,Stefan Kinne,Yutaka Kondo,Patricia K. Quinn,Marcus C. Sarofim,Martin G. Schultz,Michael Schulz,Chandra Venkataraman,Hua Zhang,Shiqiu Zhang,Nicolas Bellouin,Sarath K. Guttikunda,Philip K. Hopke,Mark Z. Jacobson,Johannes W. Kaiser,Zbigniew Klimont,Ulrike Lohmann,Joshua P. Schwarz,Drew Shindell,Trude Storelvmo,Stephen G. Warren,Charles S. Zender +30 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provided an assessment of black-carbon climate forcing that is comprehensive in its inclusion of all known and relevant processes and that is quantitative in providing best estimates and uncertainties of the main forcing terms: direct solar absorption; influence on liquid, mixed phase, and ice clouds; and deposition on snow and ice.
Journal ArticleDOI
Black carbon or brown carbon? The nature of light-absorbing carbonaceous aerosols
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that brown carbon may severely bias measurements of atmospheric "black carbon" and "elemental carbon" over vast parts of the troposphere, especially those strongly polluted by biomass burning, where the mass concentration of C brown is high relative to that of soot carbon.
Journal ArticleDOI
Spatial and seasonal distributions of carbonaceous aerosols over China
Junji Cao,Junji Cao,Junji Cao,Shuncheng Lee,Judith C. Chow,John G. Watson,Kin Fai Ho,Renjian Zhang,Zhangdong Jin,Zhenxing Shen,G. C. Chen,Y. M. Kang,Shichun Zou,L. Z. Zhang,Shi-hua Qi,Minhan Dai,Yan Cheng,K. Hu +17 more
TL;DR: In this paper, simultaneous measurements of atmospheric organic and elemental carbon (OC and EC) were taken during winter and summer seasons at 2003 in 14 cities in China, and PM2.5 samples were analyzed for OC and EC by the Interagency Monitoring of Protected Visual Environments (IMPROVE) thermal/optical reflectance protocol.
Journal ArticleDOI
Comparison of quantification methods to measure fire-derived (black/elemental) carbon in soils and sediments using reference materials from soil, water, sediment and the atmosphere
Karen Hammes,Michael W. I. Schmidt,Ronald J. Smernik,Lloyd A. Currie,William P. Ball,Thanh H. Nguyen,Thanh H. Nguyen,Patrick Louchouarn,Patrick Louchouarn,Stephane Houel,Örjan Gustafsson,Marie Elmquist,Gerard Cornelissen,Jan O. Skjemstad,Caroline A. Masiello,Jianzhong Song,Ping'an Peng,Siddhartha Mitra,Joshua C. Dunn,Patrick G. Hatcher,William C. Hockaday,Dwight M. Smith,Christoph Hartkopf-Fröder,Axel Böhmer,Burkhard Lüer,Barry J. Huebert,Wulf Amelung,Sonja Brodowski,Lin Huang,Wendy Zhang,Philip M. Gschwend,D. Xanat Flores-Cervantes,Claude Largeau,Jean-Noël Rouzaud,Cornelia Rumpel,Georg Guggenberger,Klaus Kaiser,Andrei Rodionov,Francisco Javier González-Vila,José S. Gonzalez-Perez,José María De la Rosa,David A. C. Manning,Elisa Lopez-Capel,Luyi Ding +43 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors conducted a comprehensive intercomparison of this type (multimethod, multilab, and multisample), focusing mainly on methods used for soil and sediment BC studies.
Journal ArticleDOI
Toward a standardised thermal-optical protocol for measuring atmospheric organic and elemental carbon: the EUSAAR protocol
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed an optimized thermal evolution protocol for carbonaceous aerosol fraction classification based on different types of carbonaceous PM encountered across Europe, based on the EUSAAR_2 protocol.
References
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