A model for prediction of desert dust cycle in the atmosphere

Abstract

Abstract. An integrated modeling system has been developed to accurately describe the dust cycle in the atmosphere. It is based on the SKIRON/Eta modeling system and the Eta/NCEP regional atmospheric model. The dust modules of the entire system incorporate the state of the art parameterizations of all the major phases of the atmospheric dust life such as production, diffusion, advection, and removal. These modules also include effects of the particle size distribution on aerosol dispersion. The dust production mechanism is based on the viscous/turbulent mixing, shear-free convection diffusion, and soil moisture. In addition to these sophisticated mechanisms, very high resolution databases, including elevation, soil properties, and vegetation cover are utilized. The entire system is easily configurable and transferable to any place on the Earth, it can cover domains on almost any size, and its horizontal resolution can vary from about 100 km up to approximately 4 km. It can mn on one-way-nested form if necessary. The performance of the system has been tested for various dust storm episodes, in various places and resolution using gridded analysis or forecasting fields from various sources (ECMWF and NCEP) for initial and boundary conditions. The system is in operational use during the last two years, providing 72 hour forecasts for the Mediterranean region. The results are available on the internet (http://www.icod.org.mt and http://forecast. uoa.gr).

A fully coupled atmosphere–ocean wave modeling system for the Mediterranean Sea: interactions and sensitivity to the resolved scales and mechanisms

“…The atmospheric component is based on the Workstation Eta non-hydrostatic limited area model (Papadopoulos et al, 2002;Janjic, 2001;Nickovic et al, 2001;Mesinger et al, 1988). The ocean wave component is based on the fourth generation OpenMP (OMP) version of the WAM model (Monbaliu et al, 2000;Korres et al, 2011) and the resulting name of the coupled system is WEW.…”

“…The atmospheric model is based on an advanced version of the SKIRON/Eta mesoscale meteorological model, which is a modified version of the Eta/NCEP (National Centers for Environmental Prediction) model (Kallos et al, 1997;Nickovic et al, 2001;Papadopoulos et al, 2002). This version became the core of the second generation POSEIDON weather forecasting system (Papadopoulos and Katsafados, 2009) and is fully parallelized to run efficiently on any parallel computer platform.…”

Spatio-temporal variability of concentrations and speciation of particulate matter across Spain in the CALIOPE modeling system

“…In the present work, HERMES model quantifies particle emissions resulting from abrasion of vehicle components and road surface is based on emission factor calculated by the European study developed by Düring et al (2002). The Dust REgional Atmospheric Model (BSC-DREAM8b) was designed to simulate and predict the atmospheric cycle of mineral dust (Nickovic et al, 2001;Pérez et al, 2006a,b). The domain considered in this study comprises northern Africa, the Mediterranean basin and Europe.…”

Assessment of long-term measurements of particulate matter and gaseous pollutants in South-East Mediterranean

“…Predictions from the forecasting Dust Regional Atmospheric Model at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC/DREAM) by Nickovic et al (2001) were used in order to identify the qualitative correlation of regional background concentrations with the PM 10 exceedances.. In this paper, modelled data and images have been specifically taken from the BSC-DREAM8b…”