A Community Modeling Framework to Advance Numerical Treatments of Aerosol Processes
EMSL Project ID
30993
Abstract
The direct (scattering and absorption of radiation) and indirect (cloud-aerosol interactions) effects of aerosols predicted by climate models still contain large uncertainties. Many of these uncertainties relate to the inability of current models to accurately simulate the evolution of particulate mass, composition, size distribution, hygroscopicity, and optical properties and the current haphazard approach of developing new aerosol process modules. To address these issues, we are developing an Aerosol Modeling Testbed (AMT) designed to streamline the process of testing and evaluating refined aerosol process modules over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and improve the scientific accuracy and computational speed of aerosol process modules used in climate models. The AMT consists of a modular version of a fully-coupled meteorology-chemistry-aerosol model (WRF-chem) and a suite of tools to automatically evaluate the performance of aerosol process modules via comparison with a wide range of field measurements. A modular model enables various treatments of specific aerosol processes to be systematically compared, while all other atmospheric processes (emissions, gas chemistry, meteorology, other aerosol processes, etc.) remain the same. Examples of specific aerosol processes that require further refinements to better simulate particulate evolution in climate models include new particle formation, representing the aerosol size distribution, formation of secondary organic aerosols, aerosol optical properties, aerosol-cloud interactions, and better coupling of meteorology with primary particulate emissions (dust and sea-salt) and deposition.
The simulations performed by WRF-chem are designed to resolve the spatial and temporal variations of particulate properties observed in the atmosphere. In this way, aerosol process module performance can be assessed using extensive measurements made during recent field campaigns. The design of the numerical experiments are consequently computationally expensive and require large amounts of storage to manage a large number of simulations; therefore, a use of the AMT by the scientific community requires a high performance computing facility. This proposal describes the tasks required to implement the AMT operationally on MSCFs Chinook supercomputer including porting the WRF-chem code, testing parallel I/O, setting up the components of the AMT, developing data management strategies, performing beta tests of the AMT, and enabling long-term use of the AMT by the aerosol modeling community.
Project Details
Project type
Capability Research
Start Date
2008-10-03
End Date
2010-10-01
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Team Members
Related Publications
Gustafson, W.I., Y. Qian, and J.D. Fast, 2009: An Application of the Aerosol Modeling Testbed Toolkit: Investigating Sensitivity of Aerosols to Grid Cell Size. Presented at the 10th WRF Users Workshop, Boulder CO, 25-Jun-2009.