Preprints
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3125
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3125
21 Oct 2024
 | 21 Oct 2024
Status: this preprint is open for discussion and under review for Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP).

The ACCESS-AM2 climate model strongly underestimates aerosol concentration in the Southern Ocean, but improving it could be problematic for the modelled climate system

Sonya L. Fiddes, Matthew T. Woodhouse, Marc D. Mallet, Liam Lamprey, Ruhi S. Humphries, Alain Protat, Simon P. Alexander, Hakase Hayashida, Samuel G. Putland, Branka Miljevic, and Robyn Schofield

Abstract. The interaction of natural marine aerosol with clouds and radiation is a significant source of climate model uncertainty. The Southern Ocean represents a key area to understand these interactions, and a region where significant model biases exist. Here we provide an evaluation of the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator atmosphere model which includes a double-moment aerosol scheme. We evaluate against condensation nuclei (N10) and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) from seven ship campaigns and three terrestrial locations, spanning the years 2015–2019. We find that N10 is heavily underestimated in the model across all regions and seasons by more than 50 % and in some cases by over 80 % at higher latitudes. CCN is also strongly underestimated over marine and Antarctic regions, often by more than 50 %. We then perform seven sensitivity tests to explore different aerosol configurations. We find that updating the dimethyl sulfide climatology and turning on the primary marine organic aerosol flux marginally improves marine CCN by between 4–9 %. N10 however was reduced by between 3–9 %, resulting in worse model performance. The Southern Ocean radiative bias is also reduced by this combination of changes, with limited adverse effects. We also test altering the sea spray flux to use wind gust instead of mean wind speed, which significantly improved CCN in the marine regions, but resulted in detrimental impacts on the radiation budget. Our results indicate significant problems in the model’s microphysical processes and with over tuning. We suggest this needs to be addressed in a holistic way.

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Sonya L. Fiddes, Matthew T. Woodhouse, Marc D. Mallet, Liam Lamprey, Ruhi S. Humphries, Alain Protat, Simon P. Alexander, Hakase Hayashida, Samuel G. Putland, Branka Miljevic, and Robyn Schofield

Status: open (until 02 Dec 2024)

Comment types: AC – author | RC – referee | CC – community | EC – editor | CEC – chief editor | : Report abuse
Sonya L. Fiddes, Matthew T. Woodhouse, Marc D. Mallet, Liam Lamprey, Ruhi S. Humphries, Alain Protat, Simon P. Alexander, Hakase Hayashida, Samuel G. Putland, Branka Miljevic, and Robyn Schofield

Data sets

ACCESS-AM2 ship track data Sonya Fiddes https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13864183

Interactive computing environment

ACCESS_aerosol_eval Sonya Fiddes https://github.com/sfiddes/ACCESS_aerosol_eval

Sonya L. Fiddes, Matthew T. Woodhouse, Marc D. Mallet, Liam Lamprey, Ruhi S. Humphries, Alain Protat, Simon P. Alexander, Hakase Hayashida, Samuel G. Putland, Branka Miljevic, and Robyn Schofield

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Short summary
The interaction between natural marine aerosols, clouds and radiation in the Southern Ocean is a major source of uncertainty in climate models. We evaluate the Australian climate model using aerosol observations and find it underestimates aerosol number often by over 50 %. Model changes were tested to improve aerosol concentrations, but some of our changes had severe negative effects on the larger climate system, highlighting issues in aerosol-cloud interaction modelling.