Earth System Model Aerosol-Cloud Diagnostics Package (ESMAC Diags) Version 1: Assessing E3SM Aerosol Predictions Using Aircraft, Ship, and Surface Measurements

An Earth System Model (ESM) aerosol-cloud diagnostics package is developed to facilitate the routine evaluation of aerosols, clouds and aerosol-cloud interactions simulated by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). The first version focuses on comparing simulated...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tang, Shuaiqi, Fast, Jerome D., Zhang, Kai, Hardin, Joseph C., Varble, Adam C., Shilling, John E., Mei, Fan, Zawadowicz, Maria A., Ma, Po-Lun
Format: Text
Language:English
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Aitken
Pacific
Southern Ocean
North Atlantic
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-2021-350
https://gmd.copernicus.org/preprints/gmd-2021-350/
Description
Summary:An Earth System Model (ESM) aerosol-cloud diagnostics package is developed to facilitate the routine evaluation of aerosols, clouds and aerosol-cloud interactions simulated by the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). The first version focuses on comparing simulated aerosol properties with aircraft, ship, and surface measurements, most of them are measured in-situ. The diagnostics currently covers six field campaigns in four geographical regions: Eastern North Atlantic (ENA), Central U.S. (CUS), Northeastern Pacific (NEP) and Southern Ocean (SO). These regions produce frequent liquid or mixed-phase clouds with extensive measurements available from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program and other agencies. Various types of diagnostics and metrics are performed for aerosol number, size distribution, chemical composition, CCN concentration and various meteorological quantities to assess how well E3SM represents observed aerosol properties across spatial scales. Overall, E3SM qualitatively reproduces the observed aerosol number concentration, size distribution and chemical composition reasonably well, but underestimates Aitken mode and overestimates accumulation mode aerosols over the CUS region, and underestimates aerosol number concentration over the SO region. The current version of E3SM struggles to reproduce new particle formation events frequently observed over both the CUS and ENA regions, indicating missing processes in current parameterizations. The diagnostics package is coded and organized in a way that can be easily extended to other field campaign datasets and adapted to higher-resolution model simulations. Future releases will include comprehensive cloud and aerosol-cloud interaction diagnostics.

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