Revised historical Northern Hemisphere black carbon emissions based on inverse modeling of ice core records

Black carbon emitted by incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomasshas a net warming effect in the atmosphere and reduces the albedo whendeposited on ice and snow; accurate knowledge of past emissions is essentialto quantify and model associated global climate forcing. Although bottom-upinventories provide historical Black Carbon emission estimates that are widelyused in Earth System Models, they are poorly constrained by observationsprior to the late 20th century. Here we use an objective inversion techniquebased on detailed atmospheric transport and deposition modeling to reconstruct1850 to 2000 emissions from thirteen Northern Hemisphere ice-corerecords. We find substantial discrepancies between reconstructed Black Carbonemissions and existing bottom-up inventories which do not fully capturethe complex spatial-temporal emission patterns. Our findings imply changesto existing historical Black Carbon radiative forcing estimates are necessary,with potential implications for observation-constrained climate sensitivity.