New model for aerosol mixing developed at DLR

Simulated near-surface concentration of aerosol sulfate compared with ground-based measurements (circles) from different networks: IMPROVE and CASTNET (North America, left panel); EMEP (Europe, middle) and EANET (East Asia, right). From Kaiser et al. (2019).

The third version of the aerosol submodel MADE (MADE3) has been implemented in the global climate-chemistry model EMAC v2.54 including a detailed representation of aerosol mixing states. The newly developed submodel is able to distinguish between purely soluble, purely insoluble and mixed particles and also allows simulating the interactions between the fine and coarse aerosol size modes and the aerosol-gas partitioning in the coarse mode in an explicit way.

The ability of the model to simulate global aerosol has been evaluated against a wide range of observational datasets, including ground-based measurements from several station networks around the globe (IMPROVE, CASTNET, EMEP and EANET), in-situ data from various aircraft campaigns, and satellite observations from MODIS and the ESACCI aerosol products. The evaluation showed that EMAC (MADE3) is able to capture spatial patterns of aerosol concentrations on the global scale.

The new model, developed at the DLR Institute for Atmospheric Physics in Oberpfaffenhofen which coordinated a team of twelve scientists, is ready for application and is currently being coupled to a new cloud scheme, with the goal of simulating aerosol-cloud interactions in all cloud phases (liquid, mixed-phase and ice clouds).

The full open-access paper describing MADE3 is available at: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-541-2019