Characterization of water-soluble brown carbon chromophores from wildfire plumes in the western USA using size-exclusion chromatography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Wildfires are an important source of carbonaceous aerosol in the atmosphere. Organic aerosol that absorbs light in the ultraviolet to visible spectral range is referred to as brown carbon (BrC), and its impact on Earth's radiative budget has not been well characterized. We collected water-soluble brown carbon using a particle-into-liquid sampler (PILS) on board a Twin Otter aircraft during the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) campaign. Samples were collected downwind of wildfires in the western United States from August to September 2019. We applied size-exclusion chromatography (SEC) with ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy to characterize the molecular size distribution of BrC chromophores. The wildfire plumes had transport ages of 0 to 5 h, and the absorption was dominated by chromophores with molecular weights <500 Da. With BrC normalized to a conserved biomass burning tracer, carbon monoxide, a consistent decrease in BrC absorption with plume age was not observed during FIREX-AQ. These findings are consistent with the variable trends in BrC absorption with plume age reported in recent studies. While BrC absorption trends were broadly consistent between the offline SEC analysis and the online PILS measurements, the absolute values of absorption and their spectral dependence differed. We investigate plausible explanations for the discrepancies observed between the online and offline analyses. This included solvent effects, pH, and sample storage. We suspect that sample storage impacted the absorption intensity of the offline measurements without impacting the molecular weight distribution of BrC chromophores.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".