3D particle-resolved aerosol model to quantify and reduce uncertainties in aerosolatmosphere interactions

Matthew West, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

This research aims to address key uncertainties associated with aerosol-climate impacts. Aerosol particles influence the large-scale dynamics of the atmosphere and climate because they interact with solar radiation, both directly by scattering and absorbing light and indirectly by acting as cloud condensation nuclei. Their sizes range from nanometers of micrometers, and a major source of difficulty in understanding the climate impact of aerosols is due to scale interactions. To address this modeling difficulty, the objective of this project is to produce the first-ever particle-resolved simulation of atmospheric aerosols over a regional-scale domain of California using the WRF-PartMC-MOSAIC model, which has the unique ability to track size and composition information on a per-particle level.

A model of this capability is compute-intensive, memory-intensive and communication-intensive. However, the unique capabilities of the Blue Waters system allow for these computational difficulties to be overcome. Blue Waters is an appropriate architecture for this problem because of the need for tens of thousands of cores to simulate a large domain, a fast interconnect for inter-process particle transport, and large memory per process. Blue Waters' compute power and large scale will enable further development of an ultra-high-resolution model at the large-scale production level to address questions regarding importance of aerosol representation in regional models.