The Chemistry Climate Model ECHAM6.3-HAM2.3-MOZ1.0

The chemistry climate model ECHAM-HAMMOZ contains a detailed representation of tropospheric and stratospheric reactive chemistry and state-of-the-art parametrisations of aerorols using either a modal scheme (M7) or a bin scheme (SALSA). This article describes and evaluates the model version ECHAM6.3-HAM2.3-MOZ1.0 with a focus on the tropospheric gas-phase chemistry. A ten-year model simulation was performed to test the stability of the model and provide data for its evaluation. The comparison to observations concentrates on the year 2008 and includes total column observations of ozone (O₃) and carbon monoxide (CO) from Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) and Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI), Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) observations of temperature, nitric acid (HNO₃), chlorine monoxide (ClO), and O₃ for the evaluation of polar stratospheric processes, an ozone sonde climatology, surface ozone observations from the Tropospheric Ozone Assessment Report (TOAR) database, and surface CO data from the Global Atmosphere Watch network. Global budgets of ozone, hydroxide (OH), nitrogen oxides (NO_x), aerosols, clouds, and radiation are analyzed and compared to the literature. ECHAM-HAMMOZ performs well in many aspects. However, in the base simulation, lightning NO_x emissions are very low, and the impact of the heterogeneous reaction of HNO₃ on dust and seasalt aerosol is too strong. Sensitivity simulations with increased lightning NOx or modified heterogeneous chemistry deteriorate the comparison with observations and yield excessively large ozone budget terms and too much OH. We hypothesize that this is an impact of potential issues with tropical convection in the ECHAM model.

VEIN v0.2.2: an R package for bottom-up Vehicular Emissions Inventories

Emission inventories are the quantification of pollutants from different sources. They provide important information not only for climate and weather studies, but also for urban planning and environmental health protection. We developed an open source model (named VEIN v0.2.2) that provides high resolution vehicular emissions inventories for different fields of studies. We focused on vehicular sources at street and hourly levels % they are the major source of air pollution in megacities. due to the current lack of information about these sources, mainly in developing countries. The type of emissions covered by VEIN are: exhaust (hot and cold) and evaporative considering the deterioration of the factors. VEIN also performs speciation and incorporates functions to generate and spatially allocate emissions databases. It allows users to load their own emissions factors, but it also provides emissions factors from the road transport model (Copert), the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Brazilian databases. The VEIN model reads, distributes by age of use and extrapolates hourly traffic data, and estimates hourly and spatially emissions. Based on our knowledge, VEIN is the first bottom-up vehicle emissions software that allows input to the WRF-Chem model. Therefore, the VEIN model provides an important, easy and fast way of elaborating or analyzing vehicular emissions inventories, under different scenarios. The VEIN results can be used as an input for atmospheric models, health studies, air quality standardizations and decision making.

High resolution land surface fluxes from satellite data (HOLAPS v1.0): evaluation and uncertainty assessment

Surface water and energy fluxes are essential components of the Earth system. Surface latent heat fluxes provide major energy input to the atmosphere. Despite the importance of these fluxes, state-of-the-art datasets of surface energy and water fluxes largely differ. The present paper introduces a new framework for the estimation of surface energy and water fluxes at the land surface, which allows for temporally and spatially high resolved flux estimates at the global scale (HOLAPS). The framework maximizes the usage of existing long-term satellite data records and ensures internally consistent estimates of the surface radiation and water fluxes. The manuscript introduces the technical details of the developed framework and provides results of a comprehensive sensitivity and evaluation study. Overall the results indicate very good agreement with in situ observations when compared against 49 FLUXNET stations worldwide. Largest uncertainties of latent heat flux and net radiation were found to result from uncertainties in the global solar radiation flux obtained from satellite data products.

Coupling aerosol optics to the chemical transport model MATCH (v5.5.0) and aerosol dynamics module SALSA (v1)

Modelling aerosol optical properties is a notoriously difficult task due to the particles' complex morphologies and compositions. Yet aerosols and their optical properties are important for Earth system modelling and remote sensing applications. Operational optics models often make drastic and non realistic approximations regarding morphological properties, which can introduce errors. In this study a new aerosol optics model is implemented, in which more realistic morphologies and mixing states are assumed, especially for black carbon aerosols. The model includes both external and internal mixing of all chemical species, it treats externally mixed black carbon as fractal aggregates, and it accounts for inhomogeneous internal mixing of black carbon by use of a novel "core-grey shell" model. Simulated results of radiative fluxes, backscattering coefficients and the Ångström exponent from the new optics model are compared with results from another model simulating particles as externally mixed homogeneous spheres. To gauge the impact on the optical properties from the new optics model, the known and important effects from using aerosol dynamics serves as a reference. The results show that using a more detailed description of particle morphology and mixing states influences the optical properties to the same degree as aerosol dynamics. This is an important finding suggesting that over-simplified optics models coupled to a chemical transport model can introduce considerable errors; this can strongly effect simulations of radiative fluxes in Earth-system models, and it can compromise the use of remote sensing observations of aerosols in model evaluations and chemical data assimilation.

A Consistent Prescription of Stratospheric Aerosol for Both Radiation and Chemistry in the Community Earth System Model (CESM1)

Here we describe an updated parameterization for prescribing stratospheric aerosol in the Community Earth System Model (CESM1). The need for a new parameterisation is motivated by the poor global response of most models in Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project 5 (CMIP5) to colossal volcanic perturbations to the stratospheric aerosol layer (such as the 1991 Pinatubo eruption or the 1883 Krakatau eruption) in comparison to observations. In particular, the scheme used in the CMIP5 simulations by CESM1 simulated a global temperature decrease by a factor 2 larger than was observed. The new parameterisation takes advantage of recent improvements in historical stratospheric aerosol databases to allow for varying both the mass loading and effective radius of the prescribed aerosol. Simulations utilizing the new scheme are shown to now reproduce the observed global mean temperature response as well as the temperature response of the stratosphere due to local aerosol heating after the 1991 Pinatubo eruption.

PLASIM-GENIE: a new intermediate complexity AOGCM

We describe the development, tuning and climate of PLASIM-GENIE, a new intermediate complexity Atmosphere–Ocean Global Climate Model (AOGCM), built by coupling the Planet Simulator to the GENIE earth system model. PLASIM-GENIE supersedes "GENIE-2", a coupling of GENIE to the Reading IGCM. It has been developed to join the limited number of models that bridge the gap between EMICS with simplified atmospheric dynamics and state of the art AOGCMs. A 1000 year simulation with PLASIM-GENIE requires approximately two weeks on a single node of a 2.1 GHz AMD 6172 CPU. An important motivation for intermediate complexity models is the evaluation of uncertainty. We here demonstrate the tractability of PLASIM-GENIE ensembles by deriving a "subjective" tuning of the model with a 50 member ensemble of 1000 year simulations.

Using reactive transport codes to provide mechanistic biogeochemistry representations in global land surface models: CLM-PFLOTRAN 1.0

We explore coupling to a configurable subsurface reactive transport code as a flexible and extensible approach to biogeochemistry in land surface models; our goal is to facilitate testing of alternative models and incorporation of new understanding. A reaction network with the CLM-CN decomposition, nitrification, denitrification, and plant uptake is used as an example. We implement the reactions in the open-source PFLOTRAN code, coupled with the Community Land Model (CLM), and test at Arctic, temperate, and tropical sites. To make the reaction network designed for use in explicit time stepping in CLM compatible with the implicit time stepping used in PFLOTRAN, the Monod substrate rate-limiting function with a residual concentration is used to represent the limitation of nitrogen availability on plant uptake and immobilization. To achieve accurate, efficient, and robust numerical solutions, care needs to be taken to use scaling, clipping, or log transformation to avoid negative concentrations during the Newton iterations. With a tight relative update tolerance to avoid false convergence, an accurate solution can be achieved with about 50 % more computing time than CLM in point mode site simulations using either the scaling or clipping methods. The log transformation method takes 60–100 % more computing time than CLM. The computing time increases slightly for clipping and scaling; it increases substantially for log transformation for half saturation decrease from 10−3 to 10−9 mol m−3, which normally results in decreasing nitrogen concentrations. The frequent occurrence of very low concentrations (e.g. below nanomolar) can increase the computing time for clipping or scaling by about 20 %; computing time can be doubled for log transformation. Caution needs to be taken in choosing the appropriate scaling factor because a small value caused by a negative update to a small concentration may diminish the update and result in false convergence even with very tight relative update tolerance. As some biogeochemical processes (e.g., methane and nitrous oxide production and consumption) involve very low half saturation and threshold concentrations, this work provides insights for addressing nonphysical negativity issues and facilitates the representation of a mechanistic biogeochemical description in earth system models to reduce climate prediction uncertainty.

Performance and results of the high-resolution biogeochemical model PELAGOS025 within NEMO

The present work aims at evaluating the scalability performance of a high-resolution global ocean biogeochemistry model (PELAGOS025) on massive parallel architectures and the benefits in terms of the time-to-solution reduction. PELAGOS025 is an on-line coupling between the physical ocean model NEMO and the BFM biogeochemical model. Both the models use a parallel domain decomposition along the horizontal dimension. The parallelisation is based on the message passing paradigm. The performance analysis has been done on two parallel architectures, an IBM BlueGene/Q at ALCF (Argonne Leadership Computing Facilities) and an IBM iDataPlex with Sandy Bridge processors at CMCC (Euro Mediterranean Center on Climate Change). The outcome of the analysis demonstrated that the lack of scalability is due to several factors such as the I/O operations, the memory contention, the load unbalancing due to the memory structure of the BFM component and, for the BlueGene/Q, the absence of a hybrid parallelisation approach.

Overview of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) experimental design and organisation

By coordinating the design and distribution of global climate model simulations of the past, current and future climate, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) has become one of the foundational elements of climate science. However, the need to address an ever-expanding range of scientific questions arising from more and more research communities has made it necessary to revise the organization of CMIP. After a long and wide community consultation, a new and more federated structure has been put in place. It consists of three major elements: (1) a handful of common experiments, the DECK (Diagnostic, Evaluation and Characterization of Klima experiments) and the CMIP Historical Simulation (1850–near-present) that will maintain continuity and help document basic characteristics of models across different phases of CMIP, (2) common standards, coordination, infrastructure and documentation that will facilitate the distribution of model outputs and the characterization of the model ensemble, and (3) an ensemble of CMIP-Endorsed Model Intercomparison Projects (MIPs) that will be specific to a particular phase of CMIP (now CMIP6) and that will build on the DECK and the CMIP Historical Simulation to address a large range of specific questions and fill the scientific gaps of the previous CMIP phases. The DECK and CMIP Historical Simulation, together with the use of CMIP data standards, will be the entry cards for models participating in CMIP. The participation in the CMIP6-Endorsed MIPs will be at the discretion of the modelling groups, and will depend on scientific interests and priorities. With the Grand Science Challenges of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) as its scientific backdrop, CMIP6 will address three broad questions: (i) how does the Earth system respond to forcing?, (ii) what are the origins and consequences of systematic model biases?, and (iii) how can we assess future climate changes given climate variability, predictability and uncertainties in scenarios? This CMIP6 overview paper presents the background and rationale for the new structure of CMIP, provides a detailed description of the DECK and the CMIP6 Historical Simulation, and includes a brief introduction to the 21 CMIP6-Endorsed MIPs.

Development studies towards an 11-year global gridded aerosol optical thickness reanalysis for climate and applied applications

While standalone satellite and model aerosol products see wide utilization, there is a significant need in numerous climate and applied applications for a fused product on a regular grid. Aerosol data assimilation is an operational reality at numerous centers, and like meteorological reanalyses, aerosol reanalyses will see significant use in the near future. Here we present a standardized 2003–2013 global 1° × 1° and 6 hourly modal aerosol optical thickness (AOT) reanalysis product. This dataset can be applied to basic and applied earth system science studies of significant aerosol events, aerosol impacts on numerical weather prediction, and electro-optical propagation and sensor performance, among other uses. This paper describes the science of how to develop and score an aerosol reanalysis product. This reanalysis utilizes a modified Navy Aerosol Analysis and Prediction System (NAAPS) at its core and assimilates quality controlled retrievals of AOT from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on Terra and Aqua and the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) on Terra. The aerosol source functions, including dust and smoke, were regionally tuned to obtain the best match between the model fine and coarse mode AOTs and the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) AOTs. Other model processes, including deposition, were tuned to minimize the AOT difference between the model and satellite AOT. Aerosol wet deposition in the tropics is driven with satellite retrieved precipitation, rather than the model field. The final reanalyzed fine and coarse mode AOT at 550 nm is shown to have good agreement with AERONET observations, with global mean root mean square error around 0.1 for both fine and coarse mode AOTs. This paper includes a discussion of issues particular to aerosol reanalyses that make them distinct from standard meteorological reanalyses, considerations for extending such a reanalysis outside of the NASA A-Train era, and examples of how the aerosol reanalysis can be applied or fused with other model or remote sensing products. Finally, the reanalysis is evaluated in comparison with other available studies of aerosol trends, and the implications of this comparison are discussed.