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Snow albedo is a key element in the Earth and climate system, which is regulated by snow and impurity properties. Snow albedo can be substantially reduced by the presence of light-absorbing aerosols, such as black carbon (BC). However, very little attention has been paid to the impact of BC size on snow albedo reduction, while observations have shown large variations in BC size distribution in the atmosphere and snow.
We quantify the effects of grain shape and multiple black carbon (BC)-snow internal mixing on snow albedo by explicitly resolving shape and mixing structures. Nonspherical snow grains tend to have higher albedos than spheres with the same effective sizes, while the albedo difference due to shape effects increases with grain size, with up to 0.013 and 0.055 for effective radii of 1000 ?m at visible and near-infrared bands, respectively.
Previous modeling of snow albedo, a key climate feedback parameter, follows the independent scattering approximation (ISA) such that snow grains are considered as a number of separate units with distances longer than wavelengths. Here, we develop a new snow albedo model for widely-observed close-packed snow grains internally mixed with black carbon (BC) and demonstrate that albedo simulations match closer to observations.
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