Development of RAMS-CMAQ to Simulate Aerosol Optical Depth and Aerosol Direct Radiative Forcing and Its Application to East Asia

The air quality modeling system RAMS (Regional Atmospheric Modeling System)-CMAQ (Models-3 Community Multi-scale Air Quality) to simulate the aerosol optical depth (AOD) and aerosol direct forcing (DF). The aerosol-specific extinction, single scattering albedo, and asymmetry factor are parameterized based on Mie theory taking into account the aerosol size distribution, composition, refractive index, and water uptake of solution particles. A two-stream solar radiative model considers all gaseous molecular absorption, Rayleigh scattering, and contributions from aerosols and clouds. It is applied to simulate all major aerosol concentrations (e.g., sulfate, nitrate, ammonium, organic carbon, black carbon, fine soil, and sea salt) and AOD and DF over East Asia in 2005. To evaluate its performance, the authors compare the simulated AOD values with ground-based in situ measurements. The comparison shows that RAMS-CMAQ performed well in most of the model domain and generally captured the observed variations. High AOD values (0.2-1.0) mainly appear in the Sichuan Basin as well as in central and southeastern China. The geographic distribution of DF generally follows the AOD distribution patterns, and the DF at the top-of-the-atmosphere is less than -25 and -20 W m-2 in clear-sky and all-sky over the Sichuan Basin. Both AOD and DF exhibit seasonal variations with lower values in July and higher ones in January. The DF could obviously be impacted by high cloud fractions.