UKCA Chemistry and Aerosol Tutorial 11

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What you will learn in this Tutorial

In this tutorial you will learn about the Aerosol Optical Depth and how aerosol optical properties are diagnosed by RADAER GLOMAP-mode aerosol module and how it tracks different aerosol types within several size classes.

Task 10.1: Understand how the RADAER module diagoses aerosol optical properties from GLOMAP and provide direct radiative effects to the atmosphere model

Read section 13.2 (pages 41-44) of the UKCA UMDP.

Task 10.2: Derive Aerosol Optical Depth diagnostics from your UKCA model runs

As well as the providing the waveband-averaged scattering, extinction and asymetry parameters from GLOMAP, RADAER also diagnoses monochromatic Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) for each of the GLOMAP modes.

One thing that is not included in the UMDP is the STASH section and item numbers for these GLOMAP Aerosol Optical Depth diagnostics.

UM-UKCA diagnoses the AOD from each of the GLOMAP modes as a separate STASH item.

Items 300-305 contain the AOD for the Aitken-soluble, accumulation-soluble, coarse-soluble, Aitken-insoluble, accumulation-insoluble and coarse-soluble modes respectively.

Absorption AOD

The dimensions for each of these STASH items is 2D global in longitude and latitude but there is also a third dimension containing 6 pseudo levels for the 6 monochromatic AODs stored by the model.

The standard settings for these are to store AOD at 0.38, 0.44, 0.55, 0.67, 0.87, 1.02 micron wavelengths although any wavelength can be set by modifying the values set in the RADAER fortran code.

Written by Graham Mann 2014