The Impacts of Aerosol-physics Interactions on Numerical Weather Prediction in NOAA’s Global Unified Forecast System (UFS)

A physics suite, which includes the aerosol-aware double moment Thompson-Eidhammer microphysics scheme (TH-E MP), the scale-aware and aerosol-aware Community Convective Cloud (C3) parameterization, and the MYNN-EDMF boundary layer and shallow cloud scheme, is under development at NOAA. We recently implemented a simple approach to improve the aerosol representation in the UFS. Sea salt, dust, biomass burning, and anthropogenic aerosol emissions have been embedded as CCPP-compliant subroutines. The prognostic emissions of sea-salt, and organic carbon are combined to represent the “water friendly” aerosol emission, while the prognostic emissions of dust are used to represent “ice friendly” aerosol emission for TH-E MP. With this implementation, we previously examined the aerosol indirect feedback when using the TH-E scheme in the global UFS forecast with C768 (~13km) horizontal resolution and 127 vertical levels. There are significant cloud-radiation responses to the aerosol differences, and the severely positive precipitation bias over Europe and North America was significantly alleviated when applying this aerosol emission method for indirect feedback. Here we add the indirect feedback using the C3 convective parameterization. C3 is a new collaborative development which adds several features from the currently operational SAS scheme to the Grell-Freitas parameterization. This study indicates that aerosol-physics interactions using a very simple and computationally highly efficient approach have significant impacts on the numerical weather prediction in the global UFS applications.