| 31 Aug 2026
Development of the Asian Dust Emission Scheme Version 1.0 (ADES v1.0) for East Asia in WRF-Chem v3.9.1 Constrained by in situ Tower Observations
Abstract. Accurate modelling of natural dust emissions in East Asia remains challenging mainly due to complex surface conditions. Previous dust schemes often exhibited diverse sensitivities of dust emission flux to friction velocity and relied heavily on highly uncertain topography-based static source strength functions (S). To overcome these limitations, we developed the Asian Dust Emission Scheme version 1.0 (ADES v1.0), a new semi-empirical dust emission scheme optimized for the East Asian region, directly constrained by in situ micrometeorological and multi-level PM10 observations obtained from the Horqin Desert area. Rather than relying on simple log-linear regression between dust emission flux and friction velocity, the new scheme introduces a refined dust flux formulation by directly optimizing it against field measurements. This yields a robust relationship where the dust emission flux is proportional to the friction velocity raised to the power of 1.72 (F ∝ u*1.72), which contrasts with the conventional third to fourth power relationships. Furthermore, the new scheme completely eliminates the conventional dependence on static source strength functions (S) and incorporates dynamic surface condition properties, such as soil freezing, vegetation cover, and snow fraction, as direct reduction factors that better reflect the complex land conditions of East Asia. The new scheme was implemented into the three-dimensional WRF-Chem model (version 3.9.1) along with the updated dust source region map and evaluated against two distinct Asia dust events: a wintertime event in February 2015 and a springtime event in March 2021. The control simulation utilizing the existing schemes (GOCART, AFWA, and UC schemes) exhibited severe underestimation or overestimation depending on the friction velocity and soil texture configurations. Conversely, the new semi-empirical scheme significantly reduced these systematic biases, demonstrating substantially improved performance in capturing both the onset and magnitude of dust outbreaks. Strikingly, the new scheme effectively suppressed the chronic overestimation of PM₁₀ concentrations under strong wind conditions by accounting for the realistic gentler slope of dust emission fluxes, while successfully capturing the long-range transport of dust plumes to downwind regions, including the Korean Peninsula. These findings underscore that incorporating direct in situ tower constraints and dynamic source maps into numerical models is essential for mitigating the long-lasting uncertainties in regional dust simulations over East Asia.
This manuscript provides a new semi-empirical dust emission scheme for East Asian regions. Compared to previous schemes, this scheme is constrained by in-situ observations of micrometeorological and multi-level PM10, and implemented into WRF-Chem model to simulate the observed dust events in winter 2015 and winter 2021. Comparisons between the simulations and observed PM10 show that this scheme can overall capture the magnitude and time series of PM10 variation during two dust events. This study is generally useful for improving the simulations of dust events. I have some concerns and suggestions listed as below.
A brief flowchart to show how this new scheme has been configured would be better for one to understand what is new and what is different in contrast with previous schemes.
P.122-124, dust emission flux is directly calculated from the dust concentrations at 3 and 15m measurements. Have the meteorological conditions been checked when did such calculations? Could this estimations possibly impacted by wind, or precipitation?
Fig.2, suggest to provide the day and time of dust events, e.g. with some symbols, clearly show the dust emission flux varies during the dust events and non-dust periods.
p.171: what value used forβ?
p.309-311: it is within expectations as the scheme is constrained by the measurements, it would be more convincing to include more stand alone evaluations for the deserts other than Horqin desert.
p.451-452: how do you determine the new scheme successfully simulated physically realistic dust emission fluxes?
Fig.9: the simulated PM10 concentrations is apparently higher than the measured in Gobi desert (Fig.9a), can we assume the new scheme based on Horqin desert measurements works not very well for other deserts like Gobi?
Summary: I would suggest to include more discussion on the biases and applicability of new scheme since the scheme is developed based on the measurements in Horqin desert, how accurate are the simulations of dust event in other east Asia deserts?