Hi all,
I would like to ask how can we calculate aerosol radiative forcing based on CMAQ outputs. I note that it has been described as “The radiative transfer scheme CAMRT applied in CAM3 (William et al., 2006) and CAM4 (released in April, 2010) was used to calculate the aerosol direct radiative forcing in both clear-sky and all-sky cases in this scheme.” It seems that we should calculate the radiative forcing by ourselves and CMAQ does not directly output the radiative forcing. Am I right?
If so, may I ask which scheme would be well-suited for calculating aerosol radiative forcing based on CMAQ outputs?
Any comments are highly appreciated!
@hogrefe.christian @cgnolte
Best,
Ryan
Hello Ryan,
sorry for the late response. It seems the quote you included in your post is from this Han et al. (2010) paper in which the authors developed and used the coupled RAMS/CMAQ model to estimate the aerosol radiation forcing. In my reading of their work, these calculations were performed within the model they developed, not offline using model outputs. To our knowledge, there is no publicly available version of this coupled RAMS/CMAQ model used in the study
You could perform a similar study using the two-way coupled WRF-CMAQ model. Papers that have used the two-way coupled WRF-CMAQ to study aerosol radiative effects include Xing et al., 2015 and Gan et al. (2015a).
One can also use observations and/or archived 3D CMAQ aerosol and meteorological outputs as inputs for column models performing offline calculations of aerosol radiative effects (e.g. Gan et al. (2015b) or Curci et al. (2015) ), but the specifics of the required information and how CMAQ output could be mapped to it would depend on the code used to calculate these radiative effects.
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