Wednesday, 14 October 2009: 11:30 AM
Ballroom B (Red Lion Inn Kalispell)
Development of the FIM, ESRL's new global model for medium range weather forecasting, is now being extended to include aerosols, trace gases, and the impact of wild fires on air quality and weather. The FIM uniquely combines 3 key modeling design components (icosahedral horizontal grids, isentropic-hybrid vertical coordinate, finite volume numerics), all critical to provide improved transport over existing models (e.g. Global Forecast System GFS). The isentropic-hybrid vertical coordinate is flow-following in that the vertical coordinate surfaces follow isentropic (constant potential temperature) surfaces through most of the atmosphere, from mid-troposphere upward to the model top (current testing at ~60 km). Inclusion of simple chemistry, aerosols and wildfire effects requires development of a numerical tool to generate emission data for several types of grid projection for global and regional models. Sources emission for anthropogenic (industrial, urban, transportation, biomass burning, charcoal production, waste burning, etc) and biogenic processes uses a set of published data and methodologies (e.g., RETRO, EDGAR, GEIA-POET, 3BEM, GFEDv2). In particular, the biomass burning emission model (3BEM) uses remote sensing fire count data together with global carbon density to determine the timing, location, and intensity of fire emissions as well as information to initiate the plume rise module. In our case, the sub grid scale plume rise of vegetation fires is included by embedding a 1D cloud resolving model, with appropriate lower boundary conditions, in each column of a 3D host model. The host model provides the environmental conditions, and the plume rise is simulated explicitly. The final height of the plume is then used in the source emission field of the host model to determine the effective injection height of the material emitted during the flaming phase.
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