AAAR 33rd Annual Conference
October 20 - October 24, 2014
Rosen Shingle Creek
Orlando, Florida, USA
Abstract View
Quantify the Impact of Biomass Burning Aerosols on Regional Climate over the Southeastern USA
PENG LIU, Yongtao Hu, Athanasios Nenes, Armistead Russell, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract Number: 181 Working Group: Biomass Burning Aerosol: From Emissions to Impacts
Abstract Biomass burning has been and will continue to be a major contributor to the particulate matter over the southeastern USA. In order to quantify the direct effects of biomass burning aerosols on the regional climate, we employ the WRF and coupled WRF-CMAQ (Wong et al., 2012), both of which are driven by NARR data and downscale to 12km resolution covering the southeastern USA.
Ensemble of one-year long (year of 2007) simulations will be conducted with one control run and two emission scenarios for biomass fire emissions. For the control run, both biogenic and anthropogenic emissions of the year 2007 will be used except that there is no emission from fire. Then with base emissions for the control run, the first fire emission scenario includes the multi-year average fire emission, which serves as a representative regional climate forcing from biomass burning. The second fire emission scenario is the actual fire emission for the year 2007, when extreme wildfires occurred in the region. Hence, the second emission scenario will represent an extreme regional climate forcing from biomass burning.
By comparing WRF and coupled WRF-CMAQ (control run with no fire emissions), we will be able to quantify when feedback being considered the background of the impact of emissions other than fires on regional climate. In addition, we will separate the impacts into two parts. The first part is due to the aerosol direct effect and the second part is due to bulk property change of clouds. By comparing the results from control and emission scenarios, we are interested in first, how the regional climate (especially, surface temperature, cloud coverage and precipitation) would change due to the extra forcing from biomass burning, and second, to what extent the relative contributions from aerosol direct effect and bulk cloud change would alter due to extreme conditions.