- Conference Proceedings Paper
Abstract/Summary:
Black carbon aerosol is a strong absorber of solar radiation in the atmosphere. This characteristic of BC leads to a direct radiative heating of the atmosphere and a strong cooling at the Earth's surface particularly over the land. Previous modeling studies suggest that BC aerosols are able to force a significant change in tropical convective precipitation ranging from the Pacific and Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, represented by an enhancement in the north portion and a reduction in the south portion of the ITCZ (e.g., Wang, 2004; Roberts and Jones, 2004; Chung and Seinfeld, 2005). This change occurs often well away from emission centers and is thus hypothesized as a subsequence of forced changes in the large-scale circulation by BC radiative forcing. The detailed forcing mechanism of above impact, summarized based on multiple long-term model runs using an interactive aerosol-climate model driven by various BC emissions scenarios, will be discussed.