Black carbon by petroleum activities and Arctic climate

Abstract

Flaring is a common method to constantly combust of gaseous and liquid hydrocarbons that are potentially explosive at oil/gas production and processing sites. It accompanies producing black carbon as a particulate matter, which does not take into account the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, in high-latitudes, the black carbon is potentially an important aerosol when it is deposited in white snow or ice. In this study, we conducted modeling sensitivity experiments to quantitatively evaluate the effect of flaring black carbon emissions of the 2000’s Arctic climate. We prescribed realistic black carbon emission by the gas flaring over high-latitude in the model simulation. As a result, although the emission of black carbon by flaring is constant throughout the year, its impact on climate is different by season. The flaring black carbon produces very strong Arctic warming because of albedo feedback and sea-ice feedback that amplify both spring and winter. The impact was great in spring and winter. In spring, the albedo reduction effect caused by the surface deposition of black carbon was the largest, resulting in a warming effect. Enhanced downward longwave radiation induced from an increase in cloud fraction by the flaring black carbon in the winter increased the Arctic temperature.