Inverting the East Asian Dust Emission Fluxes Using the Ensemble Kalman Smoother and Himawari-8 AODs: A Case Study with WRF-Chem v3.5.1

• Published in: Atmosphere
• Main Authors: Tie Dai, Yueming Cheng, Daisuke Goto, Nick A. J. Schutgens, Maki Kikuchi, Mayumi Yoshida, Guangyu Shi, Teruyuki Nakajima
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019
• Subjects: dust emissions; ensemble Kalman smoother; Himawari-8; aerosol optical depths; Meteorology. Climatology; QC851-999; Aerosol Robotic Network
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos10090543; https://doaj.org/article/155f9d73278344f7a26484a87f5eda92

We present the inversions (back-calculations or optimizations) of dust emissions for a severe winter dust event over East Asia in November 2016. The inversion system based on a fixed-lag ensemble Kalman smoother is newly implemented in the Weather Research and Forecasting model and is coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem). The assimilated observations are the hourly aerosol optical depths (AODs) from the next-generation geostationary satellite Himawari-8. The posterior total dust emissions (2.59 Tg) for this event are 3.8 times higher than the priori total dust emissions (0.68 Tg) during 25−27 November 2016. The net result is that the simulated aerosol horizontal and vertical distributions are both in better agreement with the assimilated Himawari-8 observations and independent observations from the ground-based AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET), the satellite-based Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO). The developed emission inversion approach, combined with the geostationary satellite observations, can be very helpful for properly estimating the Asian dust emissions.