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Modeling regional aerosol variability over California and its sensitivity to emissions and long-range transport during the 2010 CalNex and CARES campaigns

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A new paper: “Modeling regional aerosol variability over California and its sensitivity to emissions and long-range transport during the 2010 CalNex and CARES campaigns,” has been published in the Journal for Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
CalNex (the California Nexus, Research at the Nexus of Air Quality and Climate Change) is a 2010 field program funded by state of California and the Climate Program Office’s Atmospheric Chemistry, Carbon Cycle, & Climate (AC4) program.
This project shines the light on the importance of aerosol measurements and modeling in understanding aerosol processes.

The paper’s authors quantified the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting regional model with chemistry (WRF-Chem) in simulating the spatial and temporal variations in aerosol mass, composition, and size over California using the extensive meteorological, trace gas, and aerosol measurements collected during the California Nexus of Air Quality and Climate Experiment (CalNex) and the Carbonaceous Aerosol and Radiative Effects Study (CARES) conducted during May and June of 2010.

The overall objective of the field campaigns was to obtain data needed to better understand processes that affect both climate and air quality, including emission assessments, transport and chemical aging of aerosols, aerosol radiative effects.The scientists performed simulations to examine the sensitivity of aerosol concentrations to anthropogenic emissions and to long-range transport of aerosols into the domain obtained from a global model.

According to the authors, the configuration of WRF-Chem used in this study reproduced the overall synoptic conditions, thermally driven circulations, and boundary layer structure observed in region that controls the transport and mixing of trace gases and aerosols. Reducing the default emissions inventory by 50 percent led to an overall improvement in many simulated trace gases and black carbon aerosol at most sites and along most aircraft flight paths; however, simulated organic aerosol was closer to observed when there were no adjustments to the primary organic aerosol emissions.

The authors found that sulfate was better simulated over northern California whereas nitrate was better simulated over southern California. While the overall spatial and temporal variability of aerosols and their precursors were simulated reasonably well, the authors showed cases where the local transport of some aerosol plumes were either too slow or too fast, which adversely affects the statistics quantifying the differences between observed and simulated quantities.

This study shows that quantifying regional-scale variations in aerosol radiative forcing and determining the relative role of emissions from local and distant sources is challenging during `clean’ conditions and that a wide array of measurements are needed to ensure model predictions are correct for the right reasons. In this regard, the scientists concluded that the  combined CalNex and CARES data sets are an ideal test bed that can be used to evaluate aerosol models in great detail and develop improved treatments for aerosol processes.
To view a full text, visit: www.atmos-chem-phys.net/14/10013/2014/acp-14-10013-2014.pdf

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