Phys.org  September 6, 2024 Deposition of wildfire smoke on snow contributes to its darkening and accelerated snowmelt. Recent field studies have identified dark brown carbon (d-BrC) to contribute 50–75% of shortwave absorption in wildfire smoke. d-BrC is a distinct class of water-insoluble, light-absorbing organic carbon that co-exists in abundance with black carbon (BC) in snow across the world. However, the importance of d-BrC as a snow warming agent relative to BC remains unexplored. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis addressed this gap using aerosol-snow radiative transfer calculations on datasets from laboratory and field measurement and showed that d-BrC increased […]