A new framework for aerosol simulation

Description

Forcing by atmospheric aerosols remains a large source of uncertainty in assessing human influences on the climate. Although global models have moved toward including more detailed representations of aerosol populations, aerosol microphysical schemes have been evaluated against benchmark models in only limited cases. Here we introduce a new framework for simulating atmospheric aerosols based on the Quadrature Method of Moments. This new aerosol model has been designed to reproduce key features of benchmark populations simulated by the particle-resolved model PartMC-MOSAIC, while tracking as little information about aerosol distributions as is necessary. The quadrature-based model simulates the aerosol evolution using a small number of weighted particles and is, therefore, designed as a reduced particle-based model. By applying principles of maximum entropy, the quadrature-based model efficiently reproduces distributions with respect to key aerosol properties, such as critical supersaturation for cloud condensation nuclei activation and optical cross sections, with high accuracy. In addition to providing an optimized aerosol model, the present study also describes how multi-scale modeling can be used as a tool for development of advanced aerosol microphysical schemes.