Uncertainty estimates and update of Russian black carbon emissions

Emissions from gas flaring have rarely been considered in global/regional emission inventories [Amann et al., 2013; Huang et al., 2015; Huang and Fu, 2016]. Flaring is a widely used approach of discharging and disposing of gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons through combustion at oil and gas production sites including oil wells, gas wells, offshore oil and gas rigs and landfills. Black carbon plays a unique role in the Arctic climate system due to its multiple effects. It causes Arctic warming by directly absorbing sunlight from space and by darkening the surface albedo of snow and ice, which indirectly leads to further warming and melting, thus inducing an Arctic amplification effect. We reconstruct BC emissions for Russian Federation, which is the country that has the largest area in the Arctic Circle. Local Russia information such as activity data, emission factors and other emission source data are used. The measurement done by Johnson, et al. 2017 suggested that individual flares BC emission rates can be spanned more than 4 orders of magnitude (up to 53.7 g/s). By using an advanced optical technique sky-LOSA (Line-Of-Sight Attenuation), the emission factor measured in the gas flaring field of Uzbekistan [Johnson et al., 2011] and Mexico [Johnson et al., 2013] was determined to be 2 ± 0.66 and 0.067 ± 0.02 g/s, respectively. We also update other emissions including power plant and transportation sources. Preliminary results of two-way H-CMAQ simulating the transport of BC particles to the Arctic will be updated. We will discuss how it causes radiative forcing changes over the Arctic.