Cloud susceptibility and the first aerosol indirect forcing: Sensitivity to black carbon and aerosol concentrations

Abstract

Present‐day global anthropogenic emissions contribute more than half of the mass in submicron particles primarily due to sulfate and carbonaceous aerosol components derived from fossil fuel combustion and biomass burning. These anthropogenic aerosols increase cloud drop number concentration and cloud albedo. Here, we use an improved version of the fully coupled climate/chemistry models to investigate cloud susceptibility and the first indirect effect of anthropogenic aerosols (the Twomey effect). We examine the correspondence between the model simulation of cloud susceptibility and that inferred from satellite measurements to test whether our simulated aerosol concentrations and aerosol/cloud interactions give a faithful representation of these features. This comparison provides an overall measure of the adequacy of cloud cover and drop concentrations. We also address the impact of black carbon absorption in clouds on the first indirect forcing and examine the sensitivity of the forcing to different representations of natural aerosols. We find that including this absorption does not change the global forcing by more than 0.07 W m−2, but that locally it could decrease the forcing by as much as 0.7 W m−2 in regions where black carbon emissions are pronounced. Because of the nonlinear relationship between cloud drop number and aerosol number concentrations, the total forcing does not equal the sum of the forcing from each individual source. Our estimated total first indirect forcing is −1.85 W m−2, with −0.30 W m−2 associated with anthropogenic sulfate, −1.16 W m−2 associated with carbonaceous aerosols from biomass burning, and −0.52 W m−2 associated with carbonaceous aerosols from fossil fuel combustion. Estimates of forcing by sulfate and total carbonaceous aerosols increase to −0.31 and −1.67 W m−2, respectively, if natural emissions of organic aerosols are only 8.4 Tg yr−1, but decrease to −0.26 and −1.27 W m−2 if they are as large as 42 Tg yr−1. Even larger estimates of forcing are derived if dust and sea‐salt emissions are not included. The effect of aerosol abundance on cloud life cycle may be important but is not treated in this study.