Source code and data for aerosol emission and indirect feedback paper

A physics suite under development at NOAA’s Global System Laboratory (GSL) includes the aerosol-aware double moment Thompson-Eidhammer microphysics scheme (TH-E MP). This microphysics scheme uses two aerosol variables (water friendly (WFA) and ice friendly (IFA) aerosol number concentrations) to include interaction with some of the physical processes. In the original implementation, WFA and IFA depend on emissions derived from climatologies. In our approach, using the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP), we embedded sea-salt, dust, and biomass burning emission modules as well as anthropogenic aerosol emissions into the Unified Forecast System (UFS) to provide realistic aerosol emissions for these two variables. This represents a very simple approach with no additional tracer variables and therefore very limited additional computing cost. We then evaluate a comparison of simulations using the original TH-E MP approach, which derives the two aerosol variables using empirical emission formulas from climatologies (CTL) and simulations that use the online emissions (EXP). Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) is derived from the 2 variables and appears quite realistic in the runs with online emissions when compared to analyzed fields. We find less resolved precipitation over Europe and North America from the EXP run, which represents an improvement compared to observations. Also interesting are moderately increased aerosol concentrations over Southern Ocean from the EXP run invigorating the development of cloud water and enhances the resolved precipitation in those areas. This study shows that a more realistic representation of aerosol emission may be useful when using double moment microphysics schemes.