Impact of modeled versus satellite measured tropical precipitation on regional smoke optical thickness in an aerosol transport model

Abstract

Aerosol and climate models are dependent on the parameterizations of the underlying meteorological model. Precipitation schemes in global meteorological models are designed to close the regional water budget, without concern for representative wet removal. By substituting numerical model precipitation for a multi‐satellite precipitation dataset, we demonstrate the impact of modeled versus satellite‐derived precipitation on aerosol optical depth (AOD) in the Navy Aerosol Analysis and Prediction System (NAAPS). The model and satellite‐derived precipitation are shown to have similar precipitation amounts, but the precipitation area from the model is about twice that in the satellite data. The resulting difference in scavenging results in an increase in mid‐visible AOD of about 20–200% in parts of Southeast Asia and South America during the burning seasons (or 0.1–0.2 in AOD). This suggests that care must be taken when combining free‐running model and remote sensing data to evaluate smoke‐cloud interactions or to estimate source magnitudes.