New research in Nature Geoscience reveals that dark brown carbon from wildfires has a significantly stronger warming effect than previously thought. This light absorbing aerosol is widespread in wildfire plumes and can absorb as much solar radiation as black carbon.
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Basically, we underestimated how much wildfire smoke traps heat. It is not just the black carbon, but this dark brown carbon that is doing the heavy lifting in warming the atmosphere, especially in the Arctic.
This is a problem for carbon accounting. If the radiative forcing from wildfires is higher than current models show, the feedback loop between warming and more fires is tighter than we thought. We need this in the official reporting standards.
The data on mass absorption efficiency looks interesting, but I wonder how much this varies by fuel type. A boreal forest fire probably produces a different profile than a grassland fire. Does the paper break down the source material?
The abstract mentions it is widespread globally, but doesn't specify fuel types in the summary. It just says the upper bound of the warming effect could actually surpass black carbon in some regions.
