ICON-ART 2.1: a flexible tracer framework and its application for composition studies in numerical weather forecasting and climate simulations

Abstract

Atmospheric composition studies on weather and climate timescales require flexible, scalable models. The ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic model with Aerosols and Reactive Trace gases (ICON-ART) provides such an environment. Here, we introduce the most up-to-date version of the flexible tracer framework for ICON-ART and explain its application in one numerical weather forecast and one climate related case study. We demonstrate the implementation of idealised tracers and chemistry tendencies of different complexity using the ART infrastructure. Using different ICON physics configurations for weather and climate with ART, we perform integrations on different timescales, illustrating the model's performance. First, we present a hindcast experiment for the 2002 ozone hole split with two different ozone chemistry schemes using the numerical weather prediction physics configuration. We compare the hindcast with observations and discuss the confinement of the vortex split using an idealised tracer diagnostic. Secondly, we study AMIP-type integrations using a simplified chemistry scheme in conjunction with the climate physics configuration. We use two different simulations: the interactive simulation, where modelled ozone is coupled back to the radiation scheme, and the non-interactive simulation that uses a default background climatology of ozone. Additionally, we introduce changes of water vapour by methane oxidation for the interactive simulation. We discuss the impact of stratospheric ozone and water vapour variations in the interactive and non-interactive integrations on the water vapour tape recorder, as a measure of tropical upwelling changes. Additionally we explain the seasonal evolution and latitudinal distribution of the age of air. The age of air is a measure of the strength of the meridional overturning circulation with young air in the tropical upwelling region and older air in polar winter downwelling regions. We conclude that our flexible tracer framework allows for tailor-made configurations of ICON-ART in weather and climate applications that are easy to configure and run well.