PNNL

Abstract

A fully coupled meteorology-chemistry-aerosol model (WRF-Chem) with the implementation of two dust emission schemes (GOCART and DUSTRAN) into two aerosol models (MADE/SORGAM and MOSAIC) is applied over North Africa to investigate the modeling sensitivities to dust emissions and aerosol size treatments in simulating mineral dust and its shortwave (SW) radiative forcing. Model results of the spatial distribution of mineral dust and its radiative forcing are evaluated using measurements from the AMMA SOP0 campaign in January and February of 2006 over North Africa. Our study suggests that the size distribution of emitted dust can result in significant differences (up to 100%) in simulating mineral dust and its SW radiative forcing. With the same dust emission and dry deposition processes, two aerosol models, MADE/SORGAM and MOSAIC, can yield large difference in size distributions of dust particles due to their different aerosol size treatments using modal and sectional approaches respectively. However, the difference between the two aerosol models in simulating the mass concentrations and the SW radiative forcing of mineral dust is small (