A23C-0327
High-Resolution Dynamic Dust Source Function Development in the NU-WRF model
Tuesday, 15 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Dongchul Kim1, Eric M Kemp2, Mian Chin2, Zhining Tao1 and Paul A Ginoux3, (1)Universities Space Research Association Columbia, Columbia, MD, United States, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ, United States
Abstract:
Dust is the key aerosol compound that plays an important role to climate and it is also an important air pollutants. The dust source of the GOCART model in the current community WRF-chem model is in 0.25° resolution and static. In the present study we have developed a high-resolution dust source function in 1 km resolution with the surface vegetation information from the MODIS satellite. The distribution pattern and magnitude of the new dust source function are compared to the static source over South Western United States. In order to examine the impact of the new data, a case study was conducted with an extreme dust storm that occurred in Phoenix Arizona in July 2011. The NU-WRF model with the new high-resolution dynamic dust source is able to successfully capture the dust storm, which was not possible in the old static sources. However, there are still many challenges in reproducing the large spatial and temporal variations of surface concentrations for this event. Series of sensitivity runs were made to optimize the model performance, and we will discuss the challenges in simulating the extreme dust storm events.
