Abstract
To design and implement an effective emission control strategy for black carbon (BC), the locations and strength of BC sources must be identified. Lack of accurate source information from the Russian Federation has created difficulty for a range of research and policy activities in the Arctic because Russia occupies the largest landmass in the Arctic Circle. A project was initiated to resolve emission sources of BC in the Russian Federation by using the Potential Source Contribution Function (PSCF). It used atmospheric BC data from two Arctic sampling stations at Alert Nunavut, Canada, and Tiksi Bay, Russia. The geographical regions of BC emission sources in Russia were identified and summarized as follows: (1) a region surrounding Moscow, (2) regions in Eurasia stretching along the Ural Mountains from the White Sea to the Black Sea, and (3) a number of scattered areas from western Siberia to the Russian Far East. Particulate potassium ions, non-marine sulfate, and vanadium were used to assist in resolving the source types: forest fire/biomass burning, coal-fired power plant, and oil combustion. Correlating these maps with the BC map helped to resolve source regions of BC emissions and connect them to their corresponding source types. The results imply that a region south of Moscow and another north of the Ural Mountains could be significant BC sources, but none of the grid cells in these regions could be linked to forest fires, oil combustion, or coal-fired power plants based on these three markers.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 398-410 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Atmospheric Environment |
| Volume | 92 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2014 |
Funding
This research was funded by the U.S. Department of State through an Interagency Agreement administered by the Policy and International Affairs Office (PI-50) at the Department of Energy and was performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the US Department of Energy (DOE) under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. Sangeeta Sharma of Environment Canada manages and made available the BC data from Alert, Nunavut. The data are available for download through the NAtChem portal at Environment Canada. Taneil Utell of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, CO provided the data from Tiksi Bay, Russia. Elke L. Hodson of the DOE PI office is acknowledged for discussion and constructive comments. Joshua Fu and Kan Huang of University of Tennessee–Knoxville were insightful in terms of the emissions inventory in Russia and provided useful comments on missing sources. Weimin Hao of the US Forest Service and Alexander Nakhutin of the Institute of Global Climate and Ecology in Moscow, Russia, provided great perspective regarding forest fires in Russia. The author is also thankful to John M. E. Storey for discussions on the execution and support of the project at ORNL; Deborah M. Counce for technical editing, and anonymous reviewers' comments that help improve the manuscript.
Keywords
- Arctic
- Atmospheric aerosol
- Black carbon
- Emission sources
- HYSPLIT
- Russia