A Novel Approach for Determining Source-receptor Relationships in Model Simulations: A Case Study of Black Carbon Transport in Northern Hemisphere Winter
A Gaussian process emulator is applied to quantify the contributions of local and remoteemissions of black carbon to its concentrations in different regions using a Latin hypercubesampling strategy for emission perturbations in the offline version of the CommunityAtmosphere Model Version 5.1 (CAM5) simulations. The source–receptor relationships arecomputed based on simulations constrained by a standard free-running CAM5 simulation andthe ERA-Interim reanalysis product. The analysis demonstrates that the emulator is capable ofretrieving the source–receptor relationships based on a small number of CAM5 simulationswithout any modifications to the model itself. Most regions are found to be most susceptible totheir local emissions. The emulator also finds that the source–receptor relationships areapproximately linear, and the signals retrieved from the model-driven and reanalysis-drivensimulations are very similar, suggesting that the simulated circulation in CAM5 resembles theassimilated meteorology in ERA-Interim. The robustness of the results provides confidencefor application of the emulator to detect dose–response signals in the climate system.