Agricultural fire impacts on brown carbon during different seasons in Northeast China

Brown carbon (BrC) represents not only a major component of haze pollution but also a non-negligible contributor to positive radiative forcing, making it a key species for coordinating air quality and climate policies. In China, field observations on BrC remain limited given the highly variable emission sources and meteorological conditions across different regions. Here we focused on the optical properties of BrC in a distinct but rarely studied megacity in Northeast China, which is within a major agricultural region and experiences extremely cold winter. Agricultural fires were evident in April of 2021 and the fall of 2020, although open burning was strictly prohibited. Such emissions enhanced BrC's mass absorption efficiency at 365 nm (MAE₃₆₅), more efficiently by the fall fires which were inferred to have relatively high combustion efficiencies (CE). After taking CE into consideration, the relationships between MAE₃₆₅ and the levoglucosan to organic carbon ratio (a measure of the significance of agricultural fire influence) roughly converged for the fire episodes in different seasons, including those identified in February and March of 2019 by a previous campaign. Agricultural fires also influenced the determination of absorption Ångström exponent (AAE), by resulting in non-linearity for BrC's absorption spectra shown on ln-ln scale. Based on three indicators developed by this study, the non-linearity was inferred to be caused by similar chromophores although the fires were characterized by various CE levels in different seasons. In addition, for the samples without significant influence of open burning, coal combustion emissions were identified as the dominant influencing factor for MAE₃₆₅, whereas none solid link was found between the solution-based AAE and aerosol source.