William I Gustafson Jr et al 2008 Environ. Res. Lett. 3 025005 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/3/2/025005
William I Gustafson Jr, Larry K Berg, Richard C Easter and Steven J Ghan
Show affiliationsPart of Focus on Aerosol-Cloud Interactions
All estimates of aerosol indirect effects on the global energy balance have either completely neglected the influence of aerosol on convective clouds or treated the influence in a highly parameterized manner. Embedding cloud-resolving models (CRMs) within each grid cell of a global model provides a multiscale modeling framework for treating both the influence of aerosols on convective as well as stratiform clouds and the influence of clouds on the aerosol, but treating the interactions explicitly by simulating all aerosol processes in the CRM is computationally prohibitive. An alternate approach is to use horizontal statistics (e.g., cloud mass flux, cloud fraction, and precipitation) from the CRM simulation to drive a single-column parameterization of cloud effects on the aerosol and then use the aerosol profile to simulate aerosol effects on clouds within the CRM. Here, we present results from the first component of the Explicit-Cloud Parameterized-Pollutant parameterization to be developed, which handles vertical transport of tracers by clouds. A CRM with explicit tracer transport serves as a benchmark. We show that this parameterization, driven by the CRM's cloud mass fluxes, reproduces the CRM tracer transport significantly better than a single-column model that uses a conventional convective cloud parameterization.
92.60.Mt Particles and aerosols
92.60.Nv Cloud physics; stratus and cumulus clouds
92.60.Sz Air quality and air pollution
92.60.Jq Water in the atmosphere (humidity, clouds, evaporation, precipitation)
Issue 2 (April-June 2008)
Received 23 January 2008, accepted for publication 17 March 2008
Published 30 May 2008
William I Gustafson Jr et al 2008 Environ. Res. Lett. 3 025005
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