Modeling Mineral Dust and Accessing Its Impact on Radiative Forcing over East Asia

Abstract:

East Asia dust storm has been investigated with revised WRF/CMAQ modeling system in this study. Taklamkan and Gobi deserts in China and Mongolia are the major contributors for East Asia dust storm, which significantly affect air quality and regional climate over downwind areas in China, Japan and Korea. Understanding the mixing of dust and intensive anthropogenic emissions would require a regional chemistry transport model which can simulate both the emission and transport of the natural and anthropogenic particles, and also their chemical interactions as well as the particles evolutions. In this study, we conducted model development of the WRF/CMAQ modeling system by revising the dust emission scheme and implementing source-dependent speciation profiles of dust aerosol and heterogeneous chemistry. With the revised modeling system, East Asia dust impact on atmospheric chemistry and regional climate has been investigated for the period of March and April from 2006 to 2010. The revised modeling system has been demonstrated to greatly improve model's capability of reproducing dust emission and transport over East Asia by comparing with surface measurements and satellite observations.