Do regional aerosols contribute to the riverine export of dissolved black carbon? (dataset)
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Summary table of the best fitting scenarios where measured and modelled concentrations of DBC are compared (14.87Kb) Log of all measured concentrations of DBC in the Paraíba do Sul catchment (22.38Kb) R Scripts for generating ternary plots and analysing model performance (9.294Kb) File containing monthly modelled inputs to the PSR catchment (35.65Kb) Hypothetical aerosol mass balance model for the PSR catchment (27.45Kb) Excel file containing annual inputs to each catchment on a downstream basis (g/km2) - an input to R scripts provided (344.4Kb) Zip file containing measured concentrations for each sampling campaign - these are inputs to the R scripts provided (3.082Kb)Show MoreShow Less
Date
2017-08-28Author
Jones, Matthew William
Date issued
2017-08-28
Type
Dataset
Language
en
Publisher
University of Exeter
Abstract
The fate of black carbon (BC), a stable form of thermally-altered organic carbon produced during biomass and fuel combustion, remains an area of uncertainty in the global carbon cycle. The transfer of photosynthetically-derived BC into extremely long-term oceanic storage is of particular significance, and rivers are the key linkage between terrestrial sources and oceanic stores. Significant fluvial fluxes of dissolved BC to oceans result from the slow release of BC from degrading charcoal stocks; however, these fluvial fluxes may also include undetermined contributions of aerosol BC, produced by biomass and fossil fuel combustion, that are deposited in river catchments following atmospheric transport. By investigation of the Paraíba do Sul River catchment in Southeast Brazil we show that aerosol deposits can be substantial contributors to fluvial fluxes of BC. We derived spatial distributions of BC stocks within the catchment associated with soil charcoal and with aerosol from both open biomass burning and fuel combustion. We then modelled the fluvial concentrations of dissolved BC (DBC) in scenarios with varying rates of export from each stock. We analysed the ability of each scenario to reproduce the variability in DBC concentrations measured in four datasets of river water samples collected between 2010 and 2014 and found that the best-performing scenarios included a 5-18% (135-486 Mg DBC year-1) aerosol contribution. Our results suggest that aerosol deposits of BC in river catchments have a shorter residence time in catchments than charcoal BC and, therefore, contribute disproportionately (with respect to stock magnitude) towards fluvial fluxes of BC.
Description
Datasets in support of submission of manuscript to Journal of Geophysical Research. (2017)
The journal article associated with these data sets is in ORE: http://hdl.handle.net/10871/30540