Sensitivity of a Dust Event Simulation for Southwest Asia to Three Dust-Emission Schemes Currently Implemented in the Community WRF-Chem Model.

Airborne particles of mineral dust play a key role in Earth's climate system and affect human activities around the globe. In 2009, dust emission and transport physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology–Goddard Global Ozone Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART) model were added to the Weather Research and Forecasting model with chemistry (WRF-Chem) framework, starting with WRF-Chem v3.2. Since this addition, two alternative dust emission modules have been added to WRF-Chem/GOCART code, including the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) scheme and the University of Cologne (UoC) scheme. This presentation provides an overview of each dust emission scheme as implemented in WRF-Chem/GOCART, highlights important changes that have occurred to each scheme between WRF-Chem releases, and demonstrates their relative strengths and weaknesses through a comparison of simulated emissions for a dust event that occurred over the Arabian Peninsula on 25 January 2010. Results indicate reasons for disagreement amongst the three schemes and demonstrate a general need for improved terrain attribute characterization data.