An Evaluation of the CHIMERE Chemistry Transport Model to Simulate Dust Outbreaks across the Northern Hemisphere in March 2014

Abstract

Abstract:Mineral dust is one of the most important aerosols over the world, affecting health and climate. These mineral particles are mainly emitted over arid areas but may be long-range transported, impacting the local budget of air quality in urban areas. While models were extensively used to study a single specific event, or make a global analysis at coarse resolution, the goal of our study is to simultaneously focus on several affected areas-Europe, North America, Central Asia, east China and the Caribbean area-for a one-month period, March 2014, avoiding any parameter fitting to better simulate a single dust outbreak. The simulation is performed for the first time with the hemispheric version of the CHIMERE model, with a high horizontal resolution (about 10 km). In this study, an overview of several simultaneous dust outbreaks over the Northern Hemisphere is proposed to assess the capability of such modeling tools to predict dust pollution events. A quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the most striking episodes is presented with comparisons to satellite data, ground based particulate matter and calcium measurements. Despite some overestimation of dust concentrations far from emission source areas, the model can simulate the timing of the arrival of dust outbreaks on observational sites. For instance, several spectacular dust storms in the US and China are rather well captured by the models. The high resolution provides a better description and understanding of the orographic effects and the long-range transport of dust plumes.

Sensitivity of <i>CHIMERE</i> to changes in model resolution and chemistry over the northwestern Iberian Peninsula

“…Thus, in this study, an increase in vertical resolution refers to a refinement of the domain in the lower to middle troposphere. An extension of the model top to, e.g., 200 hPa has been proposed in previous studies since some dust intrusions may extend to pressure levels above 500 hPa (Bessagnet et al, 2017). However, by design of our experiments, most of the dust intrusions' trajectory is simulated by C-IFS rather than internally simulated by CHIMERE and, therefore, elevating the model top is assumed to be of of minor importance here.…”

“…To this end, version 2017r4 of the CHIMERE model is used (Mailler et al, 2017) in combination with the HTAP emission inventory version 2.2 (Janssens-Maenhout et al, 2015). Saharan dust intrusions are not accounted for by running CHIMERE on a large domain covering all relevant dust sources (Bessagnet et al, 2017), but by using a far smaller domain ingesting the global forecasts provided by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Composition Integrated Forecasting system (C-IFS) at its lateral boundaries (Flemming et al, 2015). This strategy largely reduces the computational costs and is an interesting alternative to simulating remote mineral dust emissions, e.g.…”

“…This strategy largely reduces the computational costs and is an interesting alternative to simulating remote mineral dust emissions, e.g. originating in the Sahara desert, with the CHIMERE model itself (Bessagnet et al, 2017).…”

Multimodel simulations of a springtime dust storm over northeastern China: implications of an evaluation of four commonly used air quality models (CMAQ v5.2.1, CAMx v6.50, CHIMERE v2017r4, and WRF-Chem v3.9.1)

“…An aerosol module was implemented into CHIMERE in 2004 with further modifications concerning the natural dust emissions and resuspension over the northern Atlantic and Europe (Vautard et al, 2005;Hodzic et al, 2006). Dust emissions have been verified for dust that is transported over long distances by comparison with long-term field measurements (Schmechtig et al, 2011;Bessagnet et al, 2017). The CHIMERE version 2017r4 was used in this study.…”

Simulating Performance of CHIMERE on a Late Autumnal Dust Storm over Northern China

“…The aerosol module has been implemented into CHIMERE since 2004, with further modifications concerning the natural dust emissions and resuspension over Europe [39]. The evaluations of the simulation performance for long-distance transported dust have already been implemented and compared with field measurements [40,41]. In the present model version, there were three available dust emission schemes, which were established depending on Marticorena and Bergametti (1995) (MB dust scheme) [42], Alfaro and Gomes (2001) (AG dust scheme) [43] and Kok et al (2014) (KOK dust scheme) [44], respectively.…”