Development of an aerosol-chemistry transport model coupled to non-hydrostatic icosahedral atmospheric model (NICAM) through applying a stretched grid system to regional simulations around Japan

Abstract:

Air pollution has a great impact on both climate change and human health. One effective way to tackle with these issues is a use of atmospheric aerosol-chemistry models with high-resolution in a global scale. For this purpose, we have developed an aerosol-chemistry model based on a global cloud-resolving model (GCRM), Nonhydrostatic Icosahedral Atmospheric Model (NICAM; Tomita and Satoh, Fluid. Dyn. Res. 2004; Satoh et al., J. Comput. Phys. 2008, PEPS, 2014) under MEXT/RECCA/SALSA project. In the present study, we have simulated aerosols and tropospheric ozone over Japan by our aerosol-chemistry model “NICAM-Chem” with a stretched-grid system of approximately 10 km resolution, for saving the computer resources. The aerosol and chemistry modules are based on Spectral Radiation-Transport Model for Aerosol Species (SPRINTARS; Takemura et al., J. Geophys. Res., 2005) and Chemical AGCM for Study of Atmospheric Environment and Radiative Forcing (CHASER; Sudo et al., J. Geophys. Res., 2002). We found that our model can generally reproduce both aerosols and ozone, in terms of temporal variations (daily variations of aerosols and diurnal variations of ozone). Under MEXT/RECCA/SALSA project, we also have used these results obtained by NICAM-Chem for the assessment of their impact on human health.