Geolocating Russian sources for Arctic black carbon

To design and implement an effective emission control strategy for black carbon (BC), the locations and strength of BC sources must be identified. Lack of accurate source information from the Russian Federation has created difficulty for a range of research and policy activities in the Arctic because Russia occupies the largest landmass in the Arctic Circle. A project was initiated to resolve emission sources of BC in the Russian Federation by using the Potential Source Contribution Function (PSCF). It used atmospheric BC data from two Arctic sampling stations at Alert Nunavut, Canada, and Tiksi Bay, Russia. The geographical regions of BC emission sources in Russia were identified and summarized as follows: (1) a region surrounding Moscow, (2) regions in Eurasia stretching along the Ural Mountains from the White Sea to the Black Sea, and (3) a number of scattered areas from western Siberia to the Russian Far East. Particulate potassium ions, non-marine sulfate, and vanadium were used to assist in resolving the source types: forest fire/biomass burning, coal-fired power plant, and oil combustion. Correlating these maps with the BC map helped to resolve source regions of BC emissions and connect them to their corresponding source types. The results imply that a region south of Moscow and another north of the Ural Mountains could be significant BC sources, but none of the grid cells in these regions could be linked to forest fires, oil combustion, or coal-fired power plants based on these three markers.