Abstract
In this work we use the atmospheric chemistry general circulation model EMAC (ECHAM5/MESSy2 Atmospheric Chemistry) with new physical parameterizations of desert dust emissions. We assess the impact of the different physical parameterization schemes, highlight the importance of several initialization fields, identify the key-input parameters and explore the benefits and/or disadvantages of using a-priori sources of atmospheric dust particles. This presentation will discuss primarily the processes that lead to dust emissions and explore the difficulties that arise from a global parameterization applied to areas with different and heterogeneous soils (e.g. North African versus Asian deserts). The performed case studies and sensitivity tests include comparisons with in-situ measurements of dust concentrations and satellite retrievals of aerosol optical depth. The conclusions from this work include recommendations on selecting the input fields depending on the application, in order to improve the modelling of dust globally.
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Acknowledgments
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement n° 226144.
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Questioner Name: Sunhee Lee
Q: Dust mass shown on Australian continent is on Western Australia while major dust sources are in Central Australia. Any explanation why no dust mass shown on dust source region?
A: The major Australian dust sources are located in the central part of the continent and are associated with paleolake beds consisting of fine-grained lacustrine sediments. With the use of an implicit treatment of dust sources based on the global biomes map of Olson, it is not easy to locate the Australian dust sources efficiently. Some models use a-priori definition of these dust sources (also called preferential sources) to overcome this problem. We chose not to use preferential dust sources in our model to explore the efficacy of the system to represent dust sources without external fine tuning. In the case of focusing on the Australian dust production and transport, with our modelling system, the use of a more detailed soil map will be unavoidable and essential.
Questioner Name: Sunhee Lee
Q: Stations shown on map are from fire prone region not dust prone region. Any reason why two other Aeronet stations in the Central Australia are not used?
A: The map showing the 19 Aeronet stations selected for the model evaluation does not include any Australian stations because no data was available for the year 2000 on the AOT Level 2.0 (Quality Assured Data). The map showing the stations providing dust concentration data from multiannual databases included only two stations in Australia (Cape Grim, Jabirun) and we used them in the evaluation procedure.
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Astitha, M. et al. (2014). Impact of Different Physical Parameterizations on the Global Modeling of Desert Dust – Importance of the Initialization Fields. In: Steyn, D., Builtjes, P., Timmermans, R. (eds) Air Pollution Modeling and its Application XXII. NATO Science for Peace and Security Series C: Environmental Security. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5577-2_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5577-2_20
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