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Title: Development and Evaluation of an Explicit Treatment of Aerosol Processes at Cloud Scale Within a Multi‐Scale Modeling Framework (MMF)

Journal Article · · Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001287· OSTI ID:1461620
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [1];  [1]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [1]
  1. Atmospheric Science and Global Change Division Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Richland WA USA
  2. Institute for Climate and Global Change Research and School of Atmospheric Sciences Nanjing University Nanjing China
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Modeling the aerosol lifecycle in traditional global climate models (GCM) is challenging for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the coarse grid. The multi-scale modeling framework (MMF), in which a cloud resolving model replaces conventional parameterizations of cloud processes within each GCM grid column, provides a promising framework to address this challenge. Here, we develop a new version of MMF that for the first time treats aerosol processes at cloud scale to improve the aerosol-cloud interaction representation in the model. We demonstrate that the model with the explicit aerosol treatments shows significant improvements of many aspects of the simulated aerosols compared to the previous version of MMF with aerosols parameterized at the GCM grid scale. The explicit aerosol treatments produce a significant increase of the column burdens of black carbon (BC), primary organic aerosol (POA), and sulfate by up to 40% in many remote regions, a decrease of the sea-salt aerosol burdens by 40% in remote regions. These differences are caused by the differences in aerosol convective transport and wet removal between these two models. The new model also shows reduced bias of BC surface concentration in North America and BC vertical profiles in the high-latitudes. However, the biased-high BC concentrations in the upper troposphere over the remote Pacific regions remain, requiring further improvements on other process representations (for example, secondary activation neglected in the model).

Research Organization:
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
DE‐AC02‐05CH11231; AC02-05CH11231; AC05-76RL01830
OSTI ID:
1461620
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1461621; OSTI ID: 1464497; OSTI ID: 1510935
Report Number(s):
PNNL-SA-136107
Journal Information:
Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, Journal Name: Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems Vol. 10 Journal Issue: 7; ISSN 1942-2466
Publisher:
American Geophysical Union (AGU)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 1 work
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
aerosol
aerosol-cloud ineractions
MMF
aerosol radiative forcing