Atmospheric System Research Studies
EMSL Project ID
47903
Abstract
A major PNNL's research effort funded through DOE's Atmospheric System Research (ASR) Program focuses on current knowledge gaps in aerosol effects on climate. The overall goal of this project is directly aligned with DOE's Climate and Environmental Sciences Division's (CESD) priority for ASR to "support integrated studies of key processes driving aerosol-cloud-precipitation-radiation interactions", as outlined in the CESD Strategic Plan. PNNL's ASR research will improve the understanding and modeling of the aerosol and cloud processes and their interactions, and implement that knowledge into larger-scale models through parameterization development. These efforts, coupled with other research performed as part of DOE's climate modeling programs, help improve our understanding of the integrated human-Earth system, and advance the development of community models that can be used to answer key questions related to the complex dynamics of the coupled Earth system.This proposal requests EMSL's high-performance computing resources in support of the PNNL ASR research tasks that can be grouped into three areas. The first area focuses on computational challenges associated with understanding the aerosol lifecycle, particularly those challenges associated with improving our understanding of secondary organic aerosols (SOA) and the level of complexity needed to adequately model SOA in relation with other aerosol components and quantifying the scale dependency of secondary aerosol formation processes in the atmosphere. The second area is aimed at predicting how aerosols alter properties of clouds, with the specific focus on convective clouds, which currently are not directly linked to aerosol distributions in most climate models. The third area focuses on prediction of aerosol transformation and removal of atmospheric aerosol by precipitation, which is critical for understanding of aerosol lifecycle.
Performing physically-based process modeling and regional simulations at high spatial resolution which are required for completing these tasks are computationally demanding, but needed to provide benchmarks for more sophisticated aerosol and cloud treatments that will be implemented into global climate models.
Project Details
Project type
Large-Scale EMSL Research
Start Date
2013-10-01
End Date
2015-09-30
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Co-Investigator(s)
Team Members