Abstract. SURFEX is a new externalized land and ocean surface platform that describes the surface fluxes and the evolution of four types of surfaces: nature, town, inland water and ocean. It is mostly based on pre-existing, well-validated scientific models that are continuously improved. The motivation for the building of SURFEX is to use strictly identical scientific models in a high range of applications in order to mutualise the research and development efforts. SURFEX can be run in offline mode (0-D or 2-D runs) or in coupled mode (from mesoscale models to numerical weather prediction and climate models). An assimilation mode is included for numerical weather prediction and monitoring. In addition to momentum, heat and water fluxes, SURFEX is able to simulate fluxes of carbon dioxide, chemical species, continental aerosols, sea salt and snow particles. The main principles of the organisation of the surface are described first. Then, a survey is made of the scientific module (including the coupling strategy). Finally, the main applications of the code are summarised. The validation work undertaken shows that replacing the pre-existing surface models by SURFEX in these applications is usually associated with improved skill, as the numerous scientific developments contained in this community code are used to good advantage.

International audienceRecent field studies have found large discrepancies in the measured vs. modeled SOA mass loadings in both urban and regional polluted atmospheres. The reasons for these large differences are unclear. Here we revisit a case study of SOA formation in Mexico City described by Volkamer et al. (2006), during a photochemically active period when the impact of regional biomass burning is minor or negligible, and show that the observed increase in OA/1CO is consistent with results from several groups during MILAGRO 2006. Then we use the case study to evaluate three new SOA models: 1) the update of aromatic SOA yields from recent chamber experiments (Ng et al., 2007); 2) the formation of SOA from glyoxal (Volkamer et al., 2007a); and 3) the formation of SOA from primary semivolatile and intermediate volatility species (P-S/IVOC) (Robinson et al., 2007). We also evaluate the effect of reduced partitioning of SOA into POA (Song et al., 2007). Traditional SOA precursors (mainly aromatics) by themselves still fail to produce enough SOA to match the observations by a factor of∼7. The new low-NOx aromatic pathways with very high SOA yields make a very small contribution in this high-NOx urban environment as the RO*2+NO reaction dominates the fate of the RO*2 radicals. Glyoxal contributes several μg m−3 to SOA formation, with similar timing as the measurements. P-S/IVOC are estimated from equilibrium with emitted POA, and introduce a large amount of gas-phase oxidizable carbon that was not in models before. With the formulation in Robinson et al. (2007) these species have a high SOA yield, and this mechanism can close the gap in SOA mass between measurements and models in our case study. However the volatility of SOA produced in the model is too high and the O/C ratio is somewhat lower than observations. Glyoxal SOA helps to bring the O/C ratio of predicted and observed SOA into better agreement. The sensitivities of the model to some key uncertain parameters are evaluated

[1] The African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA) is a major international campaign investigating far-reaching aspects of the African monsoon, climate and the hydrological cycle. A special observing period was established for the dry season (SOP0) with a focus on aerosol and radiation measurements. SOP0 took place during January and February 2006 and involved several ground-based measurement sites across west Africa. These were augmented by aircraft measurements made by the Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements (FAAM) aircraft during the Dust and Biomass-burning Experiment (DABEX), measurements from an ultralight aircraft, and dedicated modeling efforts. We provide an overview of these measurement and modeling studies together with an analysis of the meteorological conditions that determined the aerosol transport and link the results together to provide a balanced synthesis. The biomass burning aerosol was significantly more absorbing than that measured in other areas and, unlike industrial areas, the ratio of excess carbon monoxide to organic carbon was invariant, which may be owing to interaction between the organic carbon and mineral dust aerosol. The mineral dust aerosol in situ filter measurements close to Niamey reveals very little absorption, while other measurements and remote sensing inversions suggest significantly more absorption. The influence of both mineral dust and biomass burning aerosol on the radiation budget is significant throughout the period, implying that meteorological models should include their radiative effects for accurate weather forecasts and climate simulations. Generally, the operational meteorological models that simulate the production and transport of mineral dust show skill at lead times of 5 days or more. Climate models that need to accurately simulate the vertical profiles of both anthropogenic and natural aerosols to accurately represent the direct and indirect effects of aerosols appear to do a reasonable job, although the magnitude of the aerosol scattering is strongly dependent upon the emission data set.

Abstract. This paper presents the Meso-NH model version 5.4. Meso-NH is an atmospheric non hydrostatic research model that is applied to a broad range of resolutions, from synoptic to turbulent scales, and is designed for studies of physics and chemistry. It is a limited-area model employing advanced numerical techniques, including monotonic advection schemes for scalar transport and fourth-order centered or odd-order WENO advection schemes for momentum. The model includes state-of-the-art physics parameterization schemes that are important to represent convective-scale phenomena and turbulent eddies, as well as flows at larger scales. In addition, Meso-NH has been expanded to provide capabilities for a range of Earth system prediction applications such as chemistry and aerosols, electricity and lightning, hydrology, wildland fires, volcanic eruptions, and cyclones with ocean coupling. Here, we present the main innovations to the dynamics and physics of the code since the pioneer paper of Lafore et al. (1998) and provide an overview of recent applications and couplings.

[1] Mineral dust aerosols play an important role in the climate system. Coupled climateaerosol models are an important tool with which to quantify dust fluxes and the associated climate impact. Over the last decade or more, numerous models have been developed, both global and regional, but to date, there have been few attempts to compare the performance of these models. In this paper a comparison of five regional atmospheric models with dust modules is made, in terms of their simulation of meteorology, dust emission and transport. The intercomparison focuses on a 3-day dust event over the Bodélé depression in northern Chad, the world's single most important dust source.Simulations are compared to satellite data and in situ observations from the Bodélé Dust Experiment (BoDEx 2005). Overall, the models reproduce many of the key features of the meteorology and the large dust plumes that occur over the study domain. However, there is at least an order of magnitude range in model estimates of key quantities including dust concentration, dust burden, dust flux, and aerosol optical thickness. As such, there remains considerable uncertainty in model estimates of the dust cycle and its interaction with climate. This paper discusses the issues associated with partitioning various sources of model uncertainty.

[1] Several studies have shown the importance of desert dust aerosols in weather forecast models. Nevertheless, desert dust has been poorly represented in such models and is the source of some prediction errors, in particular for tropical and subtropical regions. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the formation and the three-dimensional transport of a severe dust storm which occurred in March 2006 over West Africa. An intense dust haze was transported southward over the Gulf of Guinea thereby generating an aerosol optical thickness (AOT) greater than 4 over Nigeria. The MesoNH mesoscale atmospheric model coupled with new dust parameterization schemes has been used to illustrate the three-dimensional transport of the dust plume and the vertical layering of this desert air mass above the lower atmosphere monsoon flux layer. It is modeled that more than 50 g m À2 of dust was emitted during this event from the surface by a strong Harmattan wind over the Sahel region. It is also shown that when the dust layer is located over the boundary layer, it can modify the atmospheric stability by as much as 9.5 K in terms of potential temperature in the lowest 2000 m of the atmosphere.

[1] Classical aerosol schemes use either a sectional (bin) or lognormal approach. Both approaches have particular capabilities and interests: the sectional approach is able to describe every kind of distribution, whereas the lognormal one makes assumption of the distribution form with a fewer number of explicit variables. For this last reason we developed a three-moment lognormal aerosol scheme named ORILAM to be coupled in three-dimensional mesoscale or CTM models. This paper presents the concept and hypothesis of a range of aerosol processes such as nucleation, coagulation, condensation, sedimentation, and dry deposition. One particular interest of ORILAM is to keep explicit the aerosol composition and distribution (mass of each constituent, mean radius, and standard deviation of the distribution are explicit) using the prediction of threemoment (m0, m3, and m6). The new model was evaluated by comparing simulations to measurements from the Escompte campaign and to a previously published aerosol model. The numerical cost of the lognormal mode is lower than two bins of the sectional one.Citation: Tulet, P., V. Crassier, F. Cousin, K. Suhre, and R. Rosset (2005), ORILAM, a three-moment lognormal aerosol scheme for mesoscale atmospheric model: Online coupling into the Meso-NH-C model and validation on the Escompte campaign, J. Geophys.

Abstract. The present work analyses the effect of dust aerosols on the surface and top of atmosphere radiative budget, surface temperature, sensible heat fluxes, atmospheric heating rate and convective activity over West Africa. The study is focused on the regional impact of a major dust event over the period of 7-14 March 2006 through numerical simulations performed with the mesoscale, nonhydrostatic atmospheric model MesoNH. Due to its importance on radiative budgets, a specific attention has been paid to the representation of dust single scattering albedo (SSA) in MesoNH by using inversions of the AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET). The radiative impacts are estimated using two parallel simulations, one including radiative effects of dust and the other without them. The simulations of dust aerosol impacts on the radiative budget indicate remarkable instantaneous (at midday) decrease of surface shortwave (SW) radiations over land, with regional (9 • -17 • N, 10 • W-20 • E) mean of −137 W/m 2 during the 9 to 12 March period. The surface dimming resulting from the presence of dust is shown to cause important reduction of both surface temperature (up to 4 • C) and sensible heat fluxes (up to 100 W/m 2 ), which is consistent with experimental observations. At the top of the atmosphere, the SW cooling (regional mean of