E1.6 E3SM Aerosol NGD

                    

Poster TitleE3SM Next-Generation Development Plan for Aerosols
AuthorsHailong WangYan FengXiaohong Liu (Unlicensed), Manish Shrivastava, Sijia Lou, Yang Yang, Rudong Zhang, Yun QianShaocheng XiePhil Rasch (pnl.gov)
First AuthorHailong Wang
Session TypeE3SM session
Session IDE1
Submission TypePoster
GroupAtmosphere
ExperimentWaterCycle and BGC
Poster Link




Abstract

Several advanced treatments to the representations of aerosols and cloud-aerosol interactions have been implemented in E3SMv1, including emissions, new aerosol particle formation, explicit aging of carbonaceous aerosol species, wet scavenging processes, ice nucleation, and deposition of light-absorbing particles to snowpack and sea ice, which have led to better simulations of aerosol spatial distributions and global impact, compared to the original model (E3SMv0/CESM1.3). Some of the treatments, however, also gave a strong regional radiative cooling. On the other hand, E3SMv1 neglects or crudely treats a few aerosol components that will be increasingly important in future climate and/or play an important biogeochemical role. Nitrate aerosol is projected to become a significant aerosol component as sulfur and carbonaceous emissions are reduced while NOand ammonia emissions continue to increase. Advanced aerosol model such as MOSAIC (Zaveri et al., 2008) is needed for the treatment of nitrate and other semi-volatile aerosol species. Global volcanic eruption emissions and stratospheric aerosols are crudely treated in E3SMv1 by prescribing stratospheric aerosol optical properties. A prognostic capability for simulating the eruption emissions and resulting stratospheric sulfate aerosol (Mills et al. 2016) is desirable. Other aerosol species such as secondary organic aerosol (SOA) and light-absorbing organic carbon (a.k.a. brown carbon) have also been neglected or treated very simply in E3SMv1. It has been shown that explicit treatments of gas- and particle-phase chemical oxidation of SOA result in a much better agreement with global measurements (Shrivastava et al. 2015).  E3SMv1 has an unrealistically short lifetime for dust particles. A more sophisticated dust emission scheme (Kok et al., 2014) and a newer size-resolved dry deposition scheme (Petroff and Zhang 2010) can be helpful. Atmospheric dust is also a major supplier of iron and phosphorus nutrients to open ocean and terrestrial ecosystems. Ideally, atmospheric dust cycle should be coupled with ocean biogeochemistry cycle. We propose a series of science-driven model improvements and developments related to the representation of aerosols and snow/ice impurities to better capture their role in the Earth’s water cycle, biogeochemistry, and cryosphere system.