Aerosol effects modeling using an online coupling between the meteorological model WRF and the chemistry-transport model CHIMERE
Abstract. The presence of airborne aerosols affects the meteorology as it induces a perturbation in the radiation budget, the number of cloud condensation nuclei and the cloud micro-physics. Those effects are difficult to model at regional scale as several distinct models are usually involved. In this paper, the coupling of the CHIMERE chemistry-transport model with the WRF meteorological model using the OASIS3-MCT coupler is presented. WRF meteorological fields along with CHIMERE aerosol optical properties are exchanged through the coupler at a high frequency in order to model the aerosol direct and semidirect effects. The WRF-CHIMERE online model has a higher computational burden than both models ran separately in offline mode (up to 42 % higher). This is mainly due to some additional computations made within the models such as more frequent calls to meteorology treatment routines or calls to optical properties computations routines. On the other hand, the overall time required to perform the OASIS3-MCT exchanges is not significant compared to the total duration of the simulations. The impact of the coupling is evaluated on a case study over Europe, northern Africa, Middle East and western Asia during the Summer 2012, through comparisons of the offline and two online simulations (with and without the aerosol optical properties feedback) to observations of temperature, Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) and surface PM10 (particulate matter with diameters lower than 10 µm) concentrations. Result shows that using the optical properties feedback induces a radiative forcing (average forcing of −4.8 W.m−2) which creates a perturbation in the average surface temperatures over desert areas (up to 2.6° locally) along with an increase of both AOD and PM10 concentrations.