Internships

Dmitri Garbuzov ’10

My project consisted of two distinct but related parts. In order to familiarize myself with the flexible modeling system and the various development tools used at GFDL I first took an existing module that implemented a new emission scheme for mineral dust in an older version of the coupled model and moved it into a standalone version of LM3 to facilitate testing and tuning. This served as an introduction to developing and building models rather than just using them for experiments. The next step and the main focus of my internship was to implement a dynamic parametrization of dry aerosol deposition that could be used for aerosols and various gaseous species based on a previous work (M.L Wesely, 1988). This paper describes a popular way of modeling deposition analogous to electrical resistances, with multiple parallel pathways of deposition e.g. upper canopy, lower canopy, ground, etc. In order to adapt this to the land model at GFDL, the number of pathways had to be reduced since only canopy and ground resistances were available in the land model. This new deposition parametrization should allow a better assessment of the accuracy of modeled aerosol tracer emission and transport. In the future, satellite observations will be compared to modeled changes of the optical properties of the earth’s surface due to aerosol deposition.