Black carbon (BC) plays an important role in the climate system because of its strong warming effect, yet the magnitude of this effect is highly uncertain owing to the complex mixing state of aerosols. Here we build a unified theoretical framework to describe BC’s mixing states, linking dynamic processes to BC coating thickness distribution, and show its self-similarity for sites in diverse environments. The size distribution of BC-containing particles is found to follow a universal law and is independent of BC core size. A new mixing state module is established based on this finding and successfully applied in global and regional models, which increases the accuracy of aerosol climate effect estimations. Our theoretical framework links observations with model simulations in both mixing state description and light absorption quantification.

Jiandong Wang, Jiaping Wang, Runlong Cai, Chao Liu, Jingkun Jiang, Wei Nie, Jinbo Wang, Nobuhiro Moteki, Rahul A. Zaveri, Xin Huang, Nan Ma, Ganzhen Chen, Zilin Wang, Yuzhi Jin, Jing Cai, Yuxuan Zhang, Xuguang Chi, Bruna A. Holanda, Jia Xing, Tengyu Liu, Ximeng Qi, Qiaoqiao Wang, Christopher Pöhlker, Hang Su, Yafang Cheng, Shuxiao Wang, Jiming Hao, Meinrat O. Andreae, Aijun Ding