A05: E3SM Revised Emission Treatment

Full Title

Impacts of spatial heterogeneity of anthropogenic aerosol emissions in a regionally-refined global aerosol-climate model

First Author

  • Taufiq Hassan

  • taufiq.hassan@pnnl.gov

All Authors

Kai Zhang (PNNL), Jianfeng Li (PNNL), Balwinder Singh (PNNL), Shixuan Zhang (PNNL), Hailong Wang (PNNL), and Po-Lun Ma (PNNL)

Topic

Atmosphere

Project

EAGLES

Abstract

Emissions of anthropogenic aerosol and their precursors are often prescribed in global aerosol models. Most of these emissions are spatially heterogeneous at model grid scales. When remapped from low-resolution data, the spatial heterogeneity in emissions can be lost, leading to large errors in the simulation. It can also cause the conservation problem if non-conservative remapping is used. The default anthropogenic emission treatment in Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) is subject to both problems. In this study, we introduce a revised emission treatment for the E3SM atmosphere model (EAM) that ensures conservation of mass fluxes and preserves the original emission heterogeneity at the model-resolved grid scale. The default treatment substantially underestimates the aerosol burden, surface concentration, and aerosol sources over highly polluted regions, while overestimates these quantities over less-polluted adjacent areas. Our revised treatment significantly improves the accuracy of the aerosol emissions from surface and elevated sources near sharp spatial gradient regions, with significant improvement in the spatial heterogeneity and variability of simulated surface concentration in high-resolution simulations.  In the next-generation E3SM running at convection-permitting scales where the resolved spatial heterogeneity is significantly increased, the revised emission treatment is expected to be better represent the aerosol emissions as well as their lifecycle and impacts on climate.

In-person

yes

Poster

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R9aUxn07owjy98vDsgWK28osMGchOTgh/view?usp=sharing

Discussion Link

taufiq.hassan@pnnl.gov