A comparison of scavenging and deposition processes in global models: results from the WCRP Cambridge Workshop of 1995

By Philip J. Rasch, Johann Feichter, K. Law, N. Mahowald, J. Penner, C. Benkovitz, C. Genthon, C. Giannakopoulos, P. Kasibhatla, D. Koch and 25 more. 2000

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on results from a World Climate Research Program workshop on representations ofscavenging and deposition processes in global transport models of the atmosphere. 15 modelswere evaluated by comparing simulations of radon, lead, sulfur dioxide, and sulfate against eachother, and against observations of these constituents. This paper provides a survey on the simulationdifferences between models. It identifies circumstances where models are consistent withobservations or with each other, and where they differ from observations or with each other. Thecomparison shows that most models are able to simulate seasonal species concentrations nearthe surface over continental sites to within a factor of 2 over many regions of the globe. Modelstend to agree more closely over source (continental) regions than for remote (polar and oceanic)regions. Model simulations differ most strongly in the upper troposphere for species undergoingwet scavenging processes. There are not a sufficient number of observations to characterize theclimatology (long-term average) of species undergoing wet scavenging in the upper troposphere.This highlights the need for either a different strategy for model evaluation (e.g., comparisons onan event by event basis) or many more observations of a few carefully chosen constituents.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/74898647dd05bad0bd4ce174d88e4e3e003f77d0

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Citations in the corpus

Aerosol size-dependent below-cloud scavenging by rain and snow in the ECHAM5-HAM (2009, background): “Global aerosol distributions are strongly controlled by the rate of removal of aerosols from the atmosphere by wet scavenging processes (Rasch et al., 2000), and these processes are represented with a great diversity between models (Textor et al., 2006).”
Modeling production and climate‐related impacts on 10Be concentration in ice cores (2006, result): “…to the discrepancies, however we note that low-altitude poleward transport in the GISS model is more efficient than in other models [Textor et al., 2006]; this appears to improve aerosol distributions at high latitudes [Koch et al., 2006] compared with many previous models [Rasch et al., 2000].”
Sulfur, sea salt, and radionuclide aerosols in GISS ModelE (2006, methodology): “Previous 210Pb models [Rasch et al., 2000a] suffered from the same seasonal bias, but had lower magnitude.”