Abstract. Large uncertainties remain when estimating the warming effects of ambient black carbon (BC) aerosols on climate. One of the key challenges in modeling the radiative effects is predicting the BC light absorption enhancement, which is mainly determined by its mass ratio of non-BC coating thickness to BC (MR). For the same MR, recent researches find that the radiative absorption enhancements by BC are also controlled by its particle-to-particle heterogeneity. In this study, the BC mixing

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... state index (χ) is developed to quantify the dispersion of ambient black carbon aerosol mixing states based on binary systems of BC and other non-black carbon components. We demonstrate that the BC light absorption enhancement increases with χ for the same MR, which indicates that χ can be employed as a factor to constrain the light absorption enhancement of ambient BC. Our framework can be further used in the model to study the black carbon radiative effects on climate change.