Improved Dust Representation and Impacts on Dust Transport and Radiative Effect in CAM5

Dust transport and spatial distribution are poorly represented in current global climate models (GCMs) including the Community Atmosphere Model version 5 (CAM5). Particularly, models lack explicit representation of super-coarse dust, which may have important implications for dust radiative forcing and impacts on biogeochemistry. A nine-mode version of the modal aerosol model (MAM9) has been developed to address these issues. In this new aerosol scheme, four dust modes have been designed to treat dust particles of sizes up to 20 mu m. The MAM9-simulated results are compared with those from the default four-mode version of MAM (MAM4) and also with the in situ surface measurements of dust concentration and deposition flux, satellite-retrieved dust extinction profile, and in situ vertical measurements of dust concentrations from the NASA Atmosphere Tomography Mission (ATom). Overall, MAM9 improves the dust representation in remote regions while maintaining reasonably good results near the dust source regions. In addition, MAM9 reduces the fine dust burden and increases the coarse dust burden globally. The increased coarse dust burden has slightly increased the dust direct radiative effect by 0.01 W m(-2) while it enhanced dust indirect radiative effect by 0.36 W m(-2), globally.

Automated summary

The nine-mode version of the modal aerosol model (MAM9) has been shown to improve the representation of dust in remote regions and globally reduce fine dust burden while increasing coarse dust burden.