Quantify the Impact of Biomass Burning Aerosols on Regional Climate over the Southeastern USA

Biomass burning has been and will continue to be a major contributor to the particulate matter over the southeastern USA. In order to quantify the direct effects of biomass burning aerosols on the regional climate, we employ the WRF and coupled WRF-CMAQ (Wong et al., 2012), both of which are driven by NARR data and downscale to 12km resolution covering the southeastern USA.

By comparing WRF and coupled WRF-CMAQ (control run with no fire emissions), we will be able to quantify when feedback being considered the background of the impact of emissions other than fires on regional climate. In addition, we will separate the impacts into two parts.  The first part is due to the aerosol direct effect and the second part is due to bulk property change of clouds. By comparing the results from control and emission scenarios, we are interested in first, how the regional climate (especially, surface temperature, cloud coverage and precipitation) would change due to the extra forcing from biomass burning, and second, to what extent the relative contributions from aerosol direct effect and bulk cloud change would alter due to extreme conditions.

References:

Wong D, Pleim J, Kang D, et al, (2012): WRF-CMAQ two-way coupled system with aerosol feedback: software development and preliminary results. Geoscientific Model Development , 5,299-312,doi: 10.5194/gmd-5-299-2012