Abstract. Emissions of aerosols and gas precursors in China have increased significantly over the past three decades with the rapid economic growth. These increases might have a large climate effect. However, global aerosol-climate models often show large biases in aerosol distribution and radiative forcing in China, and these biases are often attributed to uncertainties and biases associated with the emission inventory used to drive the models. In this study, an energy-statics and technology-based emission inventory, Multi-scale Emission Inventory for China (MEIC), was compiled and used to drive the Community Atmosphere Model Version 5 (CAM5) to evaluate aerosol distribution and radiative effects in China against observations, compared with the model simulations with the widely-used IPCC AR5 emission inventory. We found that the new MEIC emission improves the annual mean AOD simulations in eastern China by 12.9 % compared with MODIS observations and 14.7 % compared with MISR observations, and explains 22 %–28 % of the AOD low bias simulated with the AR5 emission. Seasonal variation of the MEIC emission leads to a better agreement with the observed surface concentrations of primary aerosols (i.e., primary organic carbon and black carbon) than the AR5 emission, while the seasonal variation of secondary aerosols (i.e., sulfate and secondary organic aerosol) depends less on the emission. The new emission inventory estimates the annual averaged aerosol direct radiative effect at TOA, surface, and atmosphere to be −0.50, −12.76, and 12.26 W m−2 respectively over eastern China, which are enhanced by −0.19, −2.42, and 2.23 W m−2 compared with the AR5 emission. Due to higher winter BC emission in MEIC, the atmospheric warming effect and the surface cooling of BC are twice as much as those using the AR5 emission. This study highlights the importance of improving the aerosol and gas precursor emissions in modeling the atmospheric aerosols and their radiative effects.
South African EUCAARI measurements: seasonal variation of trace gases and aerosol optical properties