Discussions for Experiments/Analysis for Nitrate Aerosols

[mingxuanwupnnl]

I'm Mingxuan Wu, an Earth Scientist working at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, USA. I'm a key aerosol model developer for U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM).

I would like to propose a comprehensive analysis on nitrate aerosol. The analysis will cover the long-term trend of nitrate aerosols, spatiotemporal distribution of nitrate, mass size distribution of nitrate, etc. This analysis work will benefit from my previous experience in analyzing mass size distribution of nitrate from E3SMv2, CESM2, and AeroCom models and model development on implementing MOSAIC module in E3SM to simulate nitrate aerosol.

It will need more model output for control experiment related to 3D concentrations of aerosol species (nitrate, ammonium, sulfate, sea salt, dust, bc, oa) in different size range (PM1 and PM4, PM2.5 and PM10) and diagnosed radiative fluxes (w/o aerosol; w/o nitrate) (Ghan et al., 2013 method). A few optional experiments will also greatly help to understand the impact of nitrate in current and future.

For PD and PI experiments, I would like to propose a no nitrate experiment, which turns off nitrate formation through both gas-aerosol partitioning and aqueous phase chemistry. This is for estimating radiative effects for nitrate, especially for indirect effects which many previous modeling studies do not provide and can be an important contribution to next IPCC report.

It is important to understand the physical and chemical processes affecting the lifecycle of nitrate. I would like to propose a few sensitivity experiments.

These are initial thoughts. Details will be provided later.