Radiative Effects of Residential Sector Emissions in China: Sensitivity to Uncertainty in Black Carbon Emissions

Abstract

AbstractResidential sector emissions of aerosols, primarily from solid fuels burned for cooking and heating purposes, are high in black carbon, a component that absorbs radiation efficiently across a wideband of wavelengths. Mitigation of residential sector emissions has been suggested as a method to rapidly reduce anthropogenic global warming. This study presents model results from a regional model with coupled chemistry, aerosols, and dynamics over an East Asian domain for January 2014 to investigate the radiative effects of residential sector emissions. Model results are evaluated against surface measurements of particulate matter and remote sensing products, comparing well but with a high aerosol optical depth bias over Sichuan and low single scattering albedo over many locations. We calculate effective radiative forcing of residential sector aerosols at the top of the atmosphere of +1.22 W/m2 over Eastern China, +1.04 W/m2 due to shortwave and +0.18 W/m2 due to longwave forcing. We decompose the shortwave forcing into component parts and find the direct radiative effect is the dominant component (+0.79 W/m2), with a smaller contribution from semidirect effects (+0.54 W/m2) partly countered by negative indirect effects (−0.29 W/m2). The effective radiative forcing varies from 0.20 to 1.97 W/m2 across a reasonable range of black carbon to total carbon emission ratios for the residential sector. Overall, this study shows that mitigation of the residential sector is likely a viable method to locally reduce short‐term atmospheric warming in China, but efforts are needed to reduce uncertainty in composition of residential sector emissions to be confident in this conclusion.