P25  Examining the Linkages between Climate, LCLUC and Dust Events in Central and East Asia with the Fully Coupled WRF-Chem-DuMo Dust Modeling System

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.