Characterization of water-soluble brown carbon (WS-BrC) from boreal forest wildfires in the summer season at northern high latitudes

Abstract

In the current study, we quantify the absorption Ångström exponent (AAE) and the mass absorption coefficient (MAC) of water-soluble brown carbon (WS-BrC) from boreal forest wildfires. We deployed a Particle into Liquid Sampler (PILS) - Liquid Waveguide Capillary Cell (LWCC)-Total Organic Carbon analyzer (TOC) system in downtown Fairbanks during the summer of 2019, to measure the light absorption by WS-BrC between around 200 nm to around 800 nm wavelength range every four minutes, and the concentration of the water-soluble organic carbon (WSOC), every two minutes. We then compute the AAE and MAC to examine the optical properties of brown carbon from boreal forest fires. During this period, several forest fires burned and we sampled particles from these fires. We explored a number of quantitative methods to compute the AAE and find that using the entire wavelength range of 300 nm to 350 nm appears to best represent the wavelength dependence of BrC absorption, in contrast to using just a pair of two wavelengths. The calculated AAE is observed to be ~3 for smaller wildfires and above ~3 for medium and large wildfires, whereas the calculated AAEnew is observed to be ~5 during the sampling of small, medium and large wildfires. The calculated MAC at 365 nm (MAC₃₆₅) tends to be ~1.0 m² g⁻¹ and remains relatively constant during wildfire events. We further compare these values to measurements reported from mid-latitude wildfires, to quantify the difference between the wildfires in Alaska and Canada from that of the wildfires in the contiguous U.S.