Uncertainty of Black Carbon Distribution and Related Radiative Forcing Involved in Cloud Processes

Parameterizations that impact wet removal of black carbon remain uncertain in global climate models. In this study, we enhance the default wet deposition scheme for BC in Community Earth System Model (CESM) to (a) add relevant physical processes that were not resolved in the default model, and (b) facilitate understanding of the relative importance of various cloud processes on BC distributions. We find that the enhanced scheme greatly improves model performance against HIPPO observations relative to the default scheme. We find that convection scavenging, aerosol activation, ice nucleation, evaporation of rain/snow, and below cloud scavenging dominate wet deposition of BC. BC conversion rates for processes related to in-cloud water/ice conversion (i.e., riming, Bergeron processes, and evaporation of cloud water sedimentation) are relatively smaller, but have large seasonal variations. We also conduct sensitivity simulations that turn off each cloud process one at a time to quantify the influence of cloud processes on BC distributions and radiative forcing. Convective scavenging is found to most significantly influence BC concentrations at mid-altitudes over the tropics and even globally. In addition, BC is more sensitive to all cloud processes over the Northern Hemisphere at high latitudes. As for BC vertical distributions, convective scavenging has a dominant influence. Aerosol activation mainly increases the fraction of BC burden below 5 km whereas ice nucleation decreases that above 10 km. During wintertime, the Bergeron process also significantly increases BC concentrations at lower altitudes over the Arctic. Our simulation yields a global BC burden of 85 Gg; corresponding direct radiative forcing (DRF) of BC estimated using the Parallel Offline Radiative Transfer (PORT) is 0.13 W m^-2, much lower than previous studies. The range of DRF derived from sensitivity simulations is large, 0.09-0.33 W m^-2, corresponding to BC burdens varying from 73 Gg to 151 Gg. Due to differences in BC vertical distributions among each sensitivity simulation, fractional changes in DRF (relative to the baseline simulation) are always higher than fractional changes in BC burdens; this occurs because relocating BC influences the radiative forcing per BC mass. Our results highlight the influences of cloud microphysical processes on BC concentrations and radiative forcing.