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(GC9)Simulation of Climate Forcing by Aerosols


EMSL Project ID
1836

Abstract

The largest source of uncertainty in estimates of the radiative forcing governing climate change is in the radiative forcing due to anthropogenic aerosols. Current estimates of the global mean of the aerosol radiative forcing range from -0.3 watt per square meter (Wm-2 )--a small fraction of the +2 Wm-2 forcing due to increasing greenhouse gases, to -3 Wm-2 -- larger than the global mean greenhouse forcing, but opposite in sign. We have developed a global aerosol model that provides arguably the most detailed treatment of aerosols and their impact on the planetary radiation balance of any model, but our estimates of radiative forcing have been hindered by our lack of access to high performance computing resources. We propose to use the MSCF to conduct a series of simulations with and without emissions of a variety of aerosol particles and aerosol precursors. These extensive simulations will enable us toproduce much more refined estimates of the impact of anthropogenic emissions on radiative forcing of climate change. To take full advantage of the parallelism available on the MSCF MPP1, we will apply the Global Array Toolkit to dynamically load balance the reactive chemistry component of our model. We will adapt our modifications of the serial NCAR Community Climate Model CCM2 to the parallel NCAR CCM3.6. We will also explore the application of parallel I/O using Chemio and MPI-I/O (e.g. ROMIO). In the area of reactive transport algorithms we will apply test the Exact Linear Part semigroup methods for advection-diffusion equations.

Project Details

Project type
Capability Research
Start Date
2002-05-31
End Date
2002-10-01
Status
Closed

Team

Principal Investigator

Steven Ghan
Institution
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Team Members

Rahul Zaveri
Institution
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Richard Easter
Institution
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Elaine Chapman
Institution
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Xindi Bian
Institution
United States Department of Agriculture - Forest Service

Related Publications

Cagin T, G Zamanakos, DT Mainz, and V Nagarajan. 1999. Recent Advances in Simulation of Dendritic Polymers. , vol. 543, Mat Res Soc, Los Angeles.