Sokolik, Irina N., Viatcheslav V. Tatarskii, and Xin
Xi, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta, GA
Within the Central and
East Asia region, dramatic climatic, environmental, and socioeconomic changes
have occurred during the past decades. These include significant changes in
land cover and land use, floods and droughts, and massive land and water
management projects. Given the intimate coupling between the land and climate
processes and wind-blown atmospheric dust, an improved understanding of how
land cover and land use (LCLU) changes affect Asian dust load will be highly
desirable to make regional and global climate change projections more credible.
This paper will present assessments of decadal dust emission, ~1950s-present,
based on the reconstructed LCLU changes that were incorporated into the fully
coupled regional dust modeling system WRF-Chem-DuMo. This model is a modified version
of the public NCAR Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Chem with advanced
treatment of size- and composition-resolved dust aerosol, which is coupled with
cloud/precipitation and radiation processes. WRF-Chem-DuMo also offers
different dust emission schemes, ranging from ÒsimpleÓ type schemes to
physically-based schemes with explicit treatment of land surface properties and
meteorology. Dust emission was computed by incorporating historical LCLU maps
into WRF-Chem-DuMo. The model was driven by re-analysis data to reproduce
actual meteorological conditions during the dust season for targeted years in
each decade. In addition, modeling experiments were performed to investigate
the influence of model grid size on simulated dust emission. Assessments of
decadal dust emissions will be presented and interpreted in the context of
regional climate and LCLU changes, including estimates of the anthropogenic
contribution to total dust and implications to dust radiative forcing.