Surabi Menon (PI)
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
smenon@lbl.gov

Development of Aerosol Microphysics, Radiative  and Cloud Microphysics Schemes for the GISS Climate Model

Atmospheric aerosols have been increasingly implicated in several studies as causing large changes in surface and top of the atmosphere (TOA) radiation budgets, circulation, cloud cover, warm and cold-phase precipitation (initiation, enhancement and suppression), melting of glaciers, etc. These climate effects are dependent on the aerosol properties -- composition, size distribution, mixing state, vertical distribution; and their impact on cloud properties -- cloud droplet number and size, cloud liquid water paths and cloud cover as well as other feedback effects from changing cloud macrophysical properties and underlying surface properties.  To evaluate future climate change due to aerosols and aerosol-cloud effects; we propose to enhance the climate change prediction capability of the newly developed version of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) climate model (ModelE) and participate in the Cloud Modeling and Analysis Initiative (CMAI). Our proposed work consists of major developments to the GISS climate model: (a) addition of the newly developed PCA-QMOM aerosol microphysical scheme, including aerosol heterogeneous chemistry effects; (b) addition of the radiative properties of internally mixed aerosol species; (c) improvements in the cloud droplet nucleation scheme to account for size resolved and internally mixed aerosol species; and in the treatment of hydrometeor spectra.  In addition we plan to evaluate climate diagnostics with newly available and existing satellite retrievals and finally perform climate change simulations aimed at analyzing future climate change predictions and determining sensitivity of climate change for changing aerosol emissions.

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