AAAR 32nd Annual Conference
September 30 - October 4, 2013
Oregon Convention Center
Portland, Oregon, USA
Abstract View
Impact of Biomass Burning Aerosols on Regional Climate over Southeast USA
PENG LIU, Yongtao Hu, Athanasios Nenes, Armistead Russell, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract Number: 469 Working Group: Aerosols, Clouds, and Climate
Abstract Great interest has been aroused in how important aerosols may play a role in the cooling of the southeastern USA. A major contributor to the particulate matters over this region is biomass burning, which is rich in black carbon and organic compounds, and may have significant feedbacks to regional climate through the direct and indirect effects.
In this study, the cloud droplet activation parameterization of Kumar et al.(2009), which considers the competition between soluble and insoluble aerosols for water vapor during cloud droplet formation in ascending air parcels, is implemented in coupled WRF-CMAQ. The water uptake properties of the biomass burning aerosol (required for predicting optical depth for direct radiative forcing, and CCN activity for indirect effects) are constrained using observations of fresh and aged biomass burning aerosol sampled during the 2008 ARctas campaign (Jacob et al., 2010). In order to isolate the direct and indirect effects, we first couple the aerosol module only with radiation module to estimate direct effect, and then with microphysics module for the indirect effect.
References:
Kumar, P., Sokolik, I.N., and Nenes, A. (2009) Parameterization of Cloud Droplet Formation for Global and Regional models: Including Adsorption Activation from Insoluble CCN., Atmos. Chem. Phys., 9, 2517-2532
Jacob, D. J., Crawford, J. H., Maring, H., Clarke, A. D., Dibb, J. E., Emmons, L. K., Ferrare, R. A., Hostetler, C. A., Russell, P. B., Singh, H. B., Thompson, A. M., Shaw, G. E., McCauley, E., Pederson, J. R., and Fisher, J. A. (2010): The Arctic Research of the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites (ARCTAS) mission: design, execution, and first results, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 10, 5191-5212, doi:10.5194/acp-10-5191-2010