EGU25-17295, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-17295
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Implementation of the Aerosol Module HAM-M7 within OpenIFS: Evaluation of Surface Concentrations
Tommi Bergman1, Eemeli Holopainen2,3, Lianghai Wu4, Harri Kokkola3,5, Anton Laakso3, Hermanni Halonen5, Kasper Juurikkala1, Philippe Le Sager4, Vincent Huijnen4, Twan van Noije4, Ramiro Checa-Garcia4, Adrian Hill6, and Marcus Köhler6
Tommi Bergman et al.
  • 1Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, Finland (tommi.bergman@fmi.fi)
  • 2Insititute of Chemical Engineering Sciences, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Patras, Greece
  • 3Finnish Meteorological Institute, Kuopio, Finland
  • 4Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, De Bilt, The Netherlands
  • 5University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland
  • 6European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, United Kingdom

Aerosols are an important component of the Earth’s atmosphere, where they influence radiative forcing, cloud microphysics, and air quality. Accurate modelling of their spatiotemporal evolution is needed for producing reliable simulations of climate and air quality impacts. Thus far the aerosol description of the ECMWF IFS (Integrated Forecasting System) has relied on a bulk-bin scheme, which provides limited information on the aerosol size distributions. For more accurate calculation of the climate effects and air quality detailed simulations of both mass and number concentrations of aerosols are required. For this work we have utilised OpenIFS-AC, which is a portable and easy-to-use version of the IFS which was recently extended with online chemistry calculation. In the OpenIFS model we replaced the bulk-bin description with the HAM-M7 (Hamburg Aerosol Model M7) modal aerosol scheme. The HAM-M7 module describes aerosol processes such as emissions, transport, deposition, and microphysical interactions across seven log-normal modes, including both mass and number concentrations as size-resolved properties for key aerosol species, including sulfate, black carbon, organic matter, sea salt, and dust. Furthermore, the current implementation within OpenIFS Cy48r1 includes aerosol interactions with radiation and cloud microphysics.

We used the model to simulate the global evolution of the different aerosol components and evaluate the performance against observational data. The model is run for one year for 2010 with CMIP6 emissions and 2024 with CAMS emissions with one year of spinup. The simulated aerosol fields are compared with observed number and mass concentrations of aerosols for the observational sites in the ACTRIS network, Furthermore, the simulated surface concentrations are compared with those provided by the aerosol models within the AeroCom project. Moreover, as the modal aerosol module is computationally more expensive than the bulk-bin module we will discuss the computational cost of running the new aerosol module.

This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon Europe projects CAMAERA - CAMS AERosol Advancement (number 101134927) and FOCI, Non-CO2 Forcers and Their Climate, Weather, Air Quality and Health Impacts (number 101056783).

How to cite: Bergman, T., Holopainen, E., Wu, L., Kokkola, H., Laakso, A., Halonen, H., Juurikkala, K., Le Sager, P., Huijnen, V., van Noije, T., Checa-Garcia, R., Hill, A., and Köhler, M.: Implementation of the Aerosol Module HAM-M7 within OpenIFS: Evaluation of Surface Concentrations, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-17295, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-17295, 2025.