FY 2011 Second Quarter: Demonstration of New Aerosol Measurement Verification Testbed for Present-Day Global Aerosol Simulations
The regional-scale Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is being used by a DOE Earth System Modeling (ESM) project titled “Improving the Characterization of Clouds, Aerosols and the Cryosphere in Climate Models” to evaluate the performance of atmospheric process modules that treat aerosols a...
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2024
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| Online Access: | http://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1011349 https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1011349 |
| Summary: | The regional-scale Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is being used by a DOE Earth System Modeling (ESM) project titled “Improving the Characterization of Clouds, Aerosols and the Cryosphere in Climate Models” to evaluate the performance of atmospheric process modules that treat aerosols and aerosol radiative forcing in the Arctic. We are using a regional-scale modeling framework for three reasons: (1) It is easier to produce a useful comparison to observations with a high resolution model; (2) We can compare the behavior of the CAM parameterization suite with some of the more complex and computationally expensive parameterizations used in WRF; (3) we can explore the behavior of this parameterization suite at high resolution. Climate models like the Community Atmosphere Model version 5 (CAM5) being used within the Community Earth System Model (CESM) will not likely be run at mesoscale spatial resolutions (10–20 km) until 5–10 years from now. The performance of the current suite of physics modules in CAM5 at such resolutions is not known, and current computing resources do not permit high-resolution global simulations to be performed routinely. We are taking advantage of two tools recently developed under PNNL Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) projects for this activity. The first is the Aerosol Modeling Testbed (Fast et al., 2011b), a new computational framework designed to streamline the process of testing and evaluating aerosol process modules over a range of spatial and temporal scales. The second is the CAM5 suite of physics parameterizations that have been ported into WRF so that their performance and scale dependency can be quantified at mesoscale spatial resolutions (Gustafson et al., 2010; with more publications in preparation). |
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