Examining the impact of wildfire smoke aerosol on clouds, precipitation, and radiative fluxes in Northern America and Russia using a fully coupled meso-scale model WRF-Chem-SMOKE and satellite data

We developed a fully-coupled meso-scale model WRF-Chem-SMOKE by incorporating a selection of smoke emission models and improving the representations of aerosol-cloud interactions in the microphysics scheme. We find that the difference in smoke emissions between different datasets, even in one fire c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Zheng, Lu
Other Authors: Sokolik, Irina N.
Language:en_US
Published: Georgia Institute of Technology 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1853/52338
Description
Summary:We developed a fully-coupled meso-scale model WRF-Chem-SMOKE by incorporating a selection of smoke emission models and improving the representations of aerosol-cloud interactions in the microphysics scheme. We find that the difference in smoke emissions between different datasets, even in one fire cluster, could lead to significant discrepancies in modeled AODs. The integrated smoke emission dataset improves the prediction of modeled AODs. We find that the modeled cloud properties and precipitation are extremely sensitive to the smoke loadings. Higher smoke loadings suppress precipitation initially, because of smoke-induced reduction of the collision-coalescence and riming processes, but ultimately cause an invigoration of precipitation.