A simple and realistic aerosol emission approach for use in a double moment aerosol-aware microphysics scheme in the NOAA UFS Weather Model

Aerosols play a significant role in the atmospheric precipitation physics of microphysics and convection. A physics suite, which includes the aerosol-aware double momentum Thompson microphysics scheme (Thompson MP), and the scale-aware and aerosol-aware Grell-Freitas (GF) convection scheme, was developed at NOAA Global System Laboratory (GSL).  In the Thompson MP, the hygroscopic aerosol is referred as a “water friendly” aerosol (WFA), and the non-hygroscopic ice-nucleating aerosol is referred as “ice friendly” aerosol (IFA). For usual Thompson applications, WFA and IFA are derived using climatologies from NASA’s Goddard Chemistry Aerosol Radiation and Transport (GOCART) model. The Common Community Physics Package (CCPP), which is designed to facilitate a host-model agnostic implementation of physics parameterizations, is a community development and is used by many model developers. All physics parameterizations in the NOAA Unified Forecast System (UFS) Weather Model must be CCPP-compliant. Here we embedded sea-salt, dust emission, and biomass burning and plumerise emission modules as well as anthropogenic aerosol emissions into the UFS by using CCPP. These aerosol modules are directly called within the physics package. The prognostic emission of sea-salt, sulfate, and organic carbon are combined to represent the WFA emission, while the prognostic emission of dust is used to represent IFA emission. Wet-scavenging is included in both, resolved and non-resolved precipitation physics. Dry deposition is also parameterized. Subgrid scale transport is included in PBL and convection. There are no additional tracer variables introduced in this simple approach. In the global forecast with C768 (~13km) horizontal resolution and 128 vertical levels, the initial results are promising.