Implementation of the Missing Aerosol Physics into LLNL IMPACT
In recent assessments of climate forcing, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lists aerosol as one o f the most important anthropogenic agents that influence climate. Atmospheric aerosols directly affect the radiative fluxes at the surface and top of the Earth's atmosphere by scattering and/or absorbing radiation. Further, aerosols indirectly change cloud microphysical properties (such as cloud drop effective radius) that also affect the radiative fluxes. However, the estimate of the magnitude of aerosol climatic effect varies widely, and aerosol/cloud interactions remain one of the most uncertain aspects of climate models today. The Atmospheric Sciences Division has formulated a plan to enhance and expand our modeling expertise in aerosol/cloud/climate interactions. Under previous LDRD support, we successfully developed a computationally efficient version of IMPACT to simulate aerosol climatology. This new version contains a compact chemical mechanism for the prediction of sulfate and also predicts the distributions of organic carbon (OC), black carbon (BC), dust, and sea salt. Furthermore, we implemented a radiation package into IMPACT to calculate the radiative forcing and heating/cooling rates by aerosols. This accomplishment built the foundation of our currently funded projects under the NASA Global Modeling and Analysis Program as well as the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Program. Despite the fact that our research is being recognized as an important effort to quantify the effects of anthropogenic aerosols on climate, the major shortcoming of our previous simulations on aerosol climatic effects is the over simplification of spatial and temporal variations of aerosol size distributions that are shaped by complicated nucleation, growth, transport and removal processes. Virtually all properties of atmospheric aerosols and clouds depend strongly on aerosol size distribution. Moreover, molecular processing on aerosol surfaces alters the hygroscopic characteristics and composition of aerosols. These processes, together with other physical properties (i.e., size, density, and refractive index), determine the atmospheric lifetime of aerosols and their radiative forcing. To better represent physical properties of aerosols, we adapted an aerosol microphysics model that simulates aerosol size distribution. Work toward this goal was done in collaboration with Professor Anthony Wexler of University of California at Davis. Professor Wexler's group has developed sectional models of atmospheric aerosol dynamics that include an arbitrary number of size sections and chemical compounds or compound classes. The model, AIM (Aerosol Inorganic Model), is designed to predict the mass distribution and composition of urban and regional particulate matter (''Sun and Wexler'', 1998a, b). This model is currently incorporated into EPA's Models-3 air quality modeling platform/CMAQ (Community Multiscale Air Quality) to test its performance with previous simulations of CMAQ over the continental US.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- US Department of Energy (US)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 15014653
- Report Number(s):
- UCRL-TR-209568; TRN: US200802%%1408
- Resource Relation:
- Other Information: PBD: 9 Feb 2005
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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