Peter Colarco (PI)
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Peter.R.Colarco@nasa.gov

Improved Estimates of Aerosol Direct and Indirect Effect on Climate Through Inclusion of Aerosol Microphysics and Aerosol Indirect Effect Parameterizations in GMAO's GEOS-5 Atmospheric GCM

The ultimate goal of the GMAO is to develop an end-to-end earth modeling capability to optimize the use of satellite data and model-data synthesis in support of understanding processes, characterizing climate variability, and predicting the Earth’s environment from regional to global scales, from weather to decadal time scales. Towards this end, we have incorporated aerosol source and sink terms from the Georgia Institute of Technology-NASA GSFC Global Ozone Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART) model into the current version of GMAO’s Atmospheric General Circulation Model. In response to this NRA we propose to extend this aerosol modeling capability by: • Incorporating the aerosol microphysics from the Community Aerosol and Radiation Model for Atmospheres (CARMA) into the GEOS-5 AGCM. CARMA treats all the basic physical and chemical processes that affect clouds and aerosols, including coagulation, nucleation, and condensation and evaporation of volatile species, providing an evolving size and composition distribution of atmospheric aerosols.   • Developing GCM parameterizations of indirect effect of aerosols on clouds and precipitation, exploiting the aerosol microphysics capabilities offered by CARMA. These new capabilities will enable a detailed study of the aerosol direct and indirect effects on climate and provide a framework for future integration of aerosol-chemistry-climate interactions and advanced prognostic cloud schemes. This improved aerosol modeling capability is the centerpiece of GMAO’s Aerosol Assimilation System (GAAS), which targets assimilation of aerosol measurements from EOS A-train satellites.  This model development activity will be conducted in close collaboration with Dr. Y. Kaufman’s group, leveraging on their expertise on measurement-based studies of aerosol-cloud interactions. The development of the aerosol indirect effect parameterization will be coordinated with Dr. Y. Sud’s TCSP proposal on aerosol effects on clouds.  This proposal is also submitted in coordination with Dr. R. Stolarski’s proposal on atmospheric chemistry modeling in GEOS-5.  Our ultimate goal is the development of a fully interactive climate-aerosol-chemistry modeling system.

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