A31D-0090
Rim Fire and its Radiative impact Simulated in CESM/CARMA
Wednesday, 16 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Pengfei Yu1, Owen B Toon2, Charles Bardeen3, Anthony Bucholtz4, Karen Hepler Rosenlof5, Pablo E Saide6, Arlindo M da Silva Jr.7, Luke D Ziemba8, Jose-Luis Jimenez9, Joshua Peter Schwarz5, Nicholas L Wagner10, Daniel A. Lack11, Michael J Mills3 and Jeffrey S. Reid4, (1)University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (2)Univ Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (3)National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, United States, (4)Naval Research Lab Monterey, Monterey, CA, United States, (5)NOAA Boulder, Boulder, CO, United States, (6)University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, United States, (7)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (8)NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, United States, (9)Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States, (10)NOAA ESRL, Boulder, CO, United States, (11)University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Abstract:
The Rim Fire of 2013, the third largest area burned by fire recorded in California history, is simulated by CESM1/CARMA. Modeled aerosol mass, number, effective radius, and extinction coefficient are within variability of data obtained from multiple airborne measurements and satellite measurements. Simulations suggest Rim Fire smoke may block 4-6% of sunlight reaching the surface, with a cooling efficiency around 120-150 W m-2 per unit aerosol optical depth. This study shows that exceptional events like the 2013 Rim Fire can be simulated by a climate model with one-degree resolution, though that resolution is still not sufficient to resolve the smoke peak near the source region.
