Intercomparisons of some dust models over West Asia

Abstract

Evaluation and assessment of dust model results is of primary importance to get a better understanding of the models' performance, and therefore, enhancing the models' set up and structure. Besides some SDS-WAS dust models, two other high resolution WRF-Chem runs have been carried out for two dust episodes over the West Asia with alterations in the soil erodibility fields as one of the primary criteria of dust sources. The main aim of this article was to investigate the high resolution WRF-Chem modeling with the default and altered soil erosion, against the WMO SDS-WAS models. In this paper we investigated the application of WRF-Chem dust modeling for the region of interest (Iran), which cannot be seen entirely by the SDS-WAS models' domains. Comparisons of modelled dust surface concentrations with ground based measurements on 8 air quality stations show that the high resolution WRF-Chem could more or less lead to better predictions. For some cases, the results of the high resolution WRF-Chem unexpectedly presented a declined performance, which indicate that the improvements in the horizontal resolution and soil erodibility could not always lead to improved dust predictions, and more factors such as the model set-up and structure should be considered.