A114-0004
Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) forecast evaluation of NOAA’s GEFS-Aerosols
Friday, 11 December 2020
Poster
Partha S Bhattacharjee, I.M. Systems Group at NCEP/EMC, College Park, MD, United States, Li Pan, NOAA NWS NCEP/EMC and IMSG, College Park, MD, United States, Barry Baker, NOAA ARL, College Park, United States, Li Zhang, NOAA ESRL/GSL and CU Boulder/CIRES, Boulder, CO, United States, Raffaele Montuoro, NOAA, ESRL/GSL and CU Boulder/CIRES, Boulder, CO, United States, Georg A Grell, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, CO, United States, Stuart A McKeen, NOAA ESRL/CSL and CU Boulder/CIRES, Boulder, CO, United States and Jeffrey McQueen, NOAA College Park, National Weather Service, College Park, MD, United States
Abstract:
Due to growing demand and interests of air quality from a diverse set of stakeholders, numerical prediction of aerosol particle properties has become an important objective at many research and operational weather centers. The National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) has partnered with NOAA/ESRL Global Systems Laboratory (GSL), Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL), NOAA/OAR Air Resources Lab (ARL), the NOAA/NESDIS Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR), and the NASA/GSFC to develop a aerosol forecast system that will provide 5-day global forecasts of total aerosol, dust, organic carbon, black carbon, large and small particles of dust and sea-salt and sulfate aerosol at around 0.25x0.25 degree horizontal resolution, 4 times per day (at 00, 06, 12 and 18 UTC). The new model will run as a single member in Version 12 of the Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) under the name of GEFS-Aerosols, replacing the current NEMS GFS Aerosol Component (NGAC). GEFS-Aerosols is based on the operational FV3 core based Global Forecast Model (GFS v15), coupled online with GSL’s version of the chemical component form WRF-Chem. The aerosol modules are based on Goddard Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART), model supplemented with ARL’s FENGSHA dust scheme, plume-rise modules from WRF-Chem, and includes recent advances in scale-aware aerosol convective transport and wet deposition processes in FV3GFS Simplified Arakawa-Schubert (SAS) scheme.
In this study, we assess Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) forecasts from GEFS-Aerosols for a 10month time period between August 2019 and May 2020 against AERONET stations, satellites (MODIS and VIIRS), and other model forecast and analysis systems. We have performed a number of case studies (Saharan Dust, biomass burning from South America, Asia) during that time period and found GEFS-Aerosols showing significant improvements in model forecasts and reduced forecast bias over biomass burning areas and some of the anthropogenic aerosol dominated regions (mainly over India, S.E. Asia and East Asia). The future incorporation of data assimilation capability in the global aerosols at NOAA is expected to result in a positively impact in aerosol forecasts and improve the prediction performance.
