ASSIMILATION OF AEROSOLS FROM BIOMASS BURNING BY THE RADIATIVE TRANSFER MODEL BRASIL-SR

Abstract:

The radiative transfer model BRASIL-SR is the main tool used by the Earth System Science Centre from the National Institute for Space Research (CCST / INPE) for solar energy resource assessment. Due to large and frequent events of burning biomass in Brazil there is a need to improve the aerosol representation in this model, mainly during the dry season (September – November) in Northern and Central Brazil. The standard aerosol representation in this model is inadequate to capture these events. It is based on the mean monthly climatological horizontal visibility with latitudinal values based on coarse global observation data. To improve the aerosol representation, climatological data of daily horizontal visibility from National Institute of Meteorology (INMET) was used to generate monthly averages from 1999 to 2012. To do a better representation of aerosols from burning biomass events, from megacities aerosol generation, and from transport processes, horizontal visibility estimates performed using aerosol optical thickness at 550 nm data from MACC Project Reanalysis model were used to adjust the aerosol representation in regions were the simple horizontal visibility fails. A methodology to generate these new visibility data from the Reanalysis was made and the resulting data was compared with the average horizontal visibility to implement a new corrected database. The solar irradiation simulated by the model using this new aerosol representation proved to be better than the previous version of the model in all regions with high aerosol loading.