Atmospheric sulfur cycle simulated in the global model GOCART: Comparison with field observations and regional budgets

By Mian Chin, D. Savoie, B. Huebert, A. Bandy, D. Thornton, T. Bates, P. Quinn, E. Saltzman, W. D. Bruyn. 2000

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a detailed evaluation of the atmospheric sulfur cycle simulated in the Georgia Tech/Goddard Global Ozone Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART) model. The model simulations of SO2, sulfate, dimethylsulfide (DMS), and methanesulfonic acid (MSA) are compared with observations from different regions on various timescales. The model agrees within 30% with the regionally averaged sulfate concentrations measured over North America and Europe but overestimates the SO2 concentrations by more than a factor of 2 there. This suggests that either the emission rates are too high, or an additional loss of SO2 which does not lead to a significant sulfate production is needed. The average wintertime sulfate concentrations over Europe in the model are nearly a factor of 2 lower than measured values, a discrepancy which may be attributed largely to the sea-salt sulfate collected in the data. The model reproduces the sulfur distributions observed over the oceans in both long-term surface measurements and short-term aircraft campaigns. Regional budget analyses show that sulfate production from SO2 oxidation is 2 to 3 times more efficient and the lifetimes of SO2 and sulfate are nearly a factor of 2 longer over the ocean than over the land. This is due to a larger free tropospheric fraction of SO2 column over the ocean than over the land, hence less loss to the surface. The North Atlantic and northwestern Pacific regions are heavily influenced by anthropogenic activities, with more than 60% of the total SO2 originating from anthropogenic sources. The average production efficiency of SO2 from DMS oxidation is estimated at 0.87 to 0.91 in most oceanic regions.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Environmental Engineering, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b7fb541cf5f24a7bdb09dfc8307b9e697278a2b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

In Environmental Engineering

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

William Cotton

Citations in the corpus

Global inventory of nitrogen oxide emissions constrained by space‐based observations of NO2 columns (2003, methodology): “Instead, we use monthly mean fields of aerosol mass concentration for September 1996–August 1997 from the Global Ozone Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART) model [Chin et al., 2000a, 2002; Ginoux et al., 2001].”
Tropospheric aerosol optical thickness from the GOCART model and comparisons with satellite and sun photometer measurements (2002, methodology): “Detailed description of most of the model components has been presented in our previous work (Chin et al. 2000a; Ginoux et al. 2001); here we give a brief summary.”
Aerosol Effects on Microstructure and Intensity of Tropical Cyclones (2012, methodology): “Rosenfeld et al. (2011) tested this hypothesis by examining the prediction errors of the maximum sustained wind velocities (dVmax) and their statistical relationship with the AOD that was calculated by the Goddard Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART) hindcast model (Chin et al. 2000).”
The AFWA dust emission scheme for the GOCART aerosol model in WRF-Chem v3.8.1 (2019, methodology): “GOCART was originally designed as a standalone, offline aerosol model driven by assimilated meteorological fields (Chin et al., 2000; Ginoux et al., 2001); however, components of the code have been added to other model frameworks since its release (e.g., Colarco et al., 2003a, b; Barnum et al.,…”
Sulfur, sea salt, and radionuclide aerosols in GISS ModelE (2006, methodology): “These difficulties simulating the sulfur cycle are common in global models [e.g., Barrie et al., 2001; Chin et al., 2000b ] and some have suggested the need for additional oxidation Figure 6. Scatterplot of observed and modeled MSA annual mean surface concentrations (top), ratio between modeled and”
Direct radiative effect of aerosols as determined from a combination of MODIS retrievals and GOCART simulations (2004, methodology): “…Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART) model is used to simulate major atmospheric aerosol components using the assimilated meteorological fields [Chin et al., 2000a, 2000b; Ginoux et al., 2001; Chin et al., 2002] and to interpret, complement, and extend both ground-based measurements and MODIS…”