Next generation atmospheric chemistry modeling with the Multiscale Infrastructure for Chemistry and Aerosols (MUSICA)

This presentation gives an overview of the Multiscale Infrastructure for Chemistry and Aerosols (MUSICA), which is taking a fundamentally new approach to modeling and will become the next-generation community infrastructure for research on atmospheric chemistry and aerosols. MUSICA will move atmospheric chemistry modeling towards a unification of the range of scales inherent in the Earth System, allowing for the exploration of the couplings across space, time and ecosystems in a consistent manner. It follows modern software standards and is designed to be able to connect to any atmosphere model. Its capability to unify various spatio-temporal scales, coupling to other Earth System components, and process-level modularization will allow advances on topics ranging from fundamental atmospheric chemistry research to air quality to climate and couplings between ecosystems. 

Two versions of MUSICA are currently available, both a configuration of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) using the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) coupled with tropospheric and stratospheric chemistry. Both versions enable global simulations with regional refinement capability. MUSICAv0 uses a hydrostatic Spectral Element dynamical core and is suitable for scales of ~5 km or higher whereas MUSICAv1 uses the non-hydrostatic Model Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) dynamical core enabling studies of regions at local scales (<5 km grid spacing). 

We will present the status of MUSICA and its partner projects including MusicBox, which is a chemical box model, and MELODIES-MONET, which is a model evaluation framework. We will also provide examples of a range of research and forecasting applications. MUSICA is being developed collaboratively by the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and university and government researchers. The community is encouraged to participate and collaborate in MUSICA development and applications. Various resources for users including wiki pages and online tutorials are provided on the MUSICA homepage (https://www2.acom.ucar.edu/sections/multi-scale-infrastructure-chemistry-modeling-musica).