Using WRF to Simulate Environmental Forcing Conditions for a Southwest Asia Dust Storm

Dust aerosols often create hazardous air quality conditions that affect human health, visibility, agriculture, and communication in various parts of the world. While substantial progress has been made in dust event simulation and hazard mitigation over the last several decades, accurately forecasting the spatial and temporal variability of dust emissions continues to be challenging. In response, researchers from US Army ERDC are collaboratively working with operational weather forecasters to establish a comprehensive understanding of atmospheric dynamics that control dust event evolution. This presentation summarizes the efforts to assess the ability of the WRF model to simulate atmospheric forcing conditions that resulted in a major dust event in Southwest Asia in July-August 2018. This effort evaluates the atmospheric forcing conditions that influence the event’s evolution against surface observation, radiosonde, and ERA5 data. This evaluation establishes whether the model effectively recreated the event’s synoptic evolution, storm progression, vertical structure, precipitation patterns, and surface wind fields. The variables considered include wind speed, wind direction, temperature, dew point temperature, precipitation, mean sea level pressure, and geopotential height. Results from various WRF configurations are also compared to determine if improvements in model performance can be achieved. The results from this effort will be used in future work to address the dust transport component of WRF-Chem. This task will help researchers discern forcing condition errors from dust parameterization issues in WRF-Chem simulations. We also encourage broader use of this assessment as a reference case study for dust transport, air quality modeling, remote sensing, soil erosion, and land management research applications.