Vaishali Naik, Arlene Fiore, Larry Horowitz from GFDL along with co-authors from NASA-AMES, NCAR, NOAA ESRL, University of Minnesota and University of California at Berkeley applied the global chemical-transport model MOZART-4 in conjunction with available observations from several regions around the globe to place constraints on the global budget of atmospheric ethanol. Their analysis indicates that over continental regions, ethanol concentrations predominantly reflect direct anthropogenic and biogenic emission sources. Furthermore, the authors find that current levels of ethanol measured in remote regions are an order of magnitude larger than those in the model, suggesting a major gap in the understanding of the sources and sinks of ethanol. Stronger constraints on the present-day budget and distribution of ethanol and other volatile organic compounds are needed to assess the impacts of increasing the use of ethanol as a fuel. Read More…
Quantifying pollution inflow and outflow over East Asia in spring with regional and global models by Meiyun Lin(Princeton U), Tracey Holloway (U Wisconsin), Greg Carmichael (U Iowa), and Arlene Fiore explores two high-resolution atmospheric chemistry models to examine the role of mesoscale versus synoptic scale processes in controlling pollution export from East Asia. Their results indicate the importance of rapid pollution venting through deep convection that develops along the leading edge of frontal system convergence bands. This transport mechanism is well captured in a high-resolution climate-chemistry model (WRF-Chem), but not adequately resolved in either of two coarse-resolution global models compared with aircraft observations of pollution lofting, suggesting a real need for high-resolution model studies of global pollution transport. Read More…
Identification of anthropogenic and natural dust sources using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Deep Blue level 2 data by Paul Ginoux (NOAA GFDL), Dmitri Garbuzov (Princeton U) and Christina Hsu (NASA) explores a new method to detect anthropogenic and natural dust sources from satellite data in the eastern part of West Africa. The anthropogenic contribution appears to be significant around the lake Chad, but the magnitude of these sources seem weaker than the natural sources, in particular relative to the Bodele depression. Read More…
