Development and Evaluation of Chemistry-Aerosol-Climate Model CAM5-Chem-MAM7-MOSAIC: Global Atmospheric Distribution and Radiative Effects of Nitrate Aerosol

An advanced aerosol treatment, with a focus on semivolatile nitrate formation, is introduced into the Community Atmosphere Model version 5 with interactive chemistry (CAM5-chem) by coupling the Model for Simulating Aerosol Interactions and Chemistry (MOSAIC) with the 7-mode Modal Aerosol Module (MAM7). An important feature of MOSAIC is dynamic partitioning of all condensable gases to the different fine and coarse mode aerosols, as governed by mode-resolved thermodynamics and heterogeneous chemical reactions. Applied in the free-running mode from 1995 to 2005 with prescribed historical climatological conditions, the model simulates global distributions of sulfate, nitrate, and ammonium in good agreement with observations and previous studies. Inclusion of nitrate resulted in similar to 10% higher global average accumulation mode number concentrations, indicating enhanced growth of Aitken mode aerosols from nitrate formation. While the simulated accumulation mode nitrate burdens are high over the anthropogenic source regions, the sea-salt and dust modes respectively constitute about 74% and 17% of the annual global average nitrate burden. Regional clear-sky shortwave radiative cooling of up to -5 W m(-2) due to nitrate is seen, with a much smaller global average cooling of -0.05 W m(-2). Significant enhancements in regional cloud condensation nuclei (at 0.1% supersaturation) and cloud droplet number concentrations are also attributed to nitrate, causing an additional global average shortwave cooling of -0.8 W m(-2). Taking into consideration of changes in both longwave and shortwave radiation under all-sky conditions, the net change in the top of the atmosphere radiative fluxes induced by including nitrate aerosol is -0.7 W m(-2).

Automated summary

The introduction of nitrate aerosol in the model allows for accurate simulation of global aerosol distributions, showing the impact of nitrate on aerosol formation and atmospheric thermodynamics processes. Nitrate leads to increased aerosol growth and cooling effects on a global scale.