Episode simulation of Asian dust storms with an air quality modeling system

Abstract

A dust deflation module was developed and coupled with the air quality modeling system RAMS-CMAQ to simultaneously treat all the major tropospheric aerosols (i.e., organic and black carbons, sulfate, nitrate, ammonia, soil dust, and sea salt). Then the coupled system was applied to East Asia to simulate Asian dust aerosol generation, transport and dry/wet removal processes during 14–25 March 2002 when two strong dust storms occurred consecutively. To evaluate model performance and to analyze the observed features of dust aerosols over the East Asian region, model results were compared to concentrations of suspended particulate matter of 10 µm or less (PM10; 1-h intervals) at four remote Japanese stations and daily air pollution index (API) values for PM10 at four large Chinese cities. The modeled values were generally in good agreement with observed data, and the model reasonably reproduced two dust storm outbreaks and generally predicted the dust onset and cessation times at each observation site. In addition, hourly averaged values of aerosol optical thickness (AOT) were calculated and compared with observations at four Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) stations to assess the model’s capability of estimating dust aerosol column burden. Analysis shows that modeled and observed AOT values were generally comparable and that the contribution of dust aerosols to AOT was significant only with regard to their source regions and their transport paths.