Performance of KMA-ADAM3 in Identifying Asian Dust Days over Northern China

Abstract

Recently, the Korea Meteorological Administration developed Asian Dust Aerosol Model version 3 (ADAM3) by incorporating additional parameters into ADAM2, including anthropogenic particulate matter (PM) emissions, modification of dust generation by considering real-time surface vegetation, and assimilations of surface PM observations and satellite-measured aerosol optical depth. This study evaluates the performance of ADAM3 in identifying Asian dust days over the dust source regions in Northern China and their variations according to regions and soil types by comparing its performance with ADAM2 (from January to June of 2017). In all regions the performance of ADAM3 was markedly improved, especially for Northwestern China, where the threat score (TS) and the probability of detection (POD) improved from 5.4% and 5.5% to 30.4% and 34.4%, respectively. ADAM3 outperforms ADAM2 for all soil types, especially for the sand-type soil for which TS and POD are improved from 39.2.0% and 50.7% to 48.9% and 68.2%, respectively. Despite these improvements in regions and surface soil types, Asian dust emission formulas in ADAM3 need improvement for the loess-type soils to modulate the overestimation of Asian dust events related to anthropogenic emissions in the Huabei Plain and Manchuria.

Keywords

• Asian Dust Aerosol Model 3 (ADAM3)
• Asian dust days
• Northern China
• soil types