Modeling atmospheric brown carbon in the GISS ModelE Earth system model

Abstract. Brown carbon (BrC) is an absorbing organic aerosol, primarily emitted through biomass burning, that exhibits light absorption unique from both black carbon (BC) and other organic aerosols (OA). Despite many field and laboratory studies seeking to constrain BrC properties, the radiative forcing of BrC is still highly uncertain. To better understand it’s climate impact, we introduced BrC to the One-Moment Aerosol (OMA) module of the GISS ModelE Earth system model (ESM). We assessed ModelE sensitivity to primary BrC processed through a novel chemical aging scheme, as well as secondary BrC formed from biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs). Initial results show BrC typically contributes a top of the atmosphere (TOA) radiative effect of 0.04 W m-2. Sensitivity tests indicate that explicitly simulating BrC (separating it from other OA), including secondary BrC, and simulating chemical bleaching of BrC all contribute distinguishable radiative effects and should be accounted for in BrC schemes. This addition of prognostic BrC to ModelE allows for greater physical and chemical complexity in OA representation with no apparent trade-off in model performance as evaluation of ModelE aerosol optical depth, with and without the BrC scheme, against AERONET and MODIS retrieval data reveals similar skill in both cases. Thus, BrC should be explicitly simulated to allow for more physically based chemical composition, which is crucial for more detailed OA study like comparisons to in-situ measurement campaigns. We include additional recommendations for BrC representation within ESMs at the end of this paper.