Siyuan Wang, CIRES & ESRL: Marine Aerosols

COMPASS 2024-04-11: Siyuan Wang, CIRES & ESRL
"Advancing the Representation of Marine Aerosols and Wildfire Smoke in Models"

The ocean is a large source of trace gases and aerosols, with major impacts on the self-cleansing capacity of the atmosphere and the radiative balance of the climate system. Many of the marine emitted trace gases undergo chemical and physical processes in the atmosphere, contributing to the formation and growth of aerosols. In the first half of this presentation, I will discuss some of my recent work on marine emissions of volatile organic compounds and their interactions with aerosols, focusing on aqueous-phase chemistry on wet aerosols and cloud droplets and their impacts on air quality and climate system. Given the growing concern of wildfires in recent years, I will explore wildfire smoke in the second half of the presentation. Wildfires are very challenging to represent in models, with plume injection height being one major source of uncertainty. Plumes with low injection often lead to worsening air quality in nearby regions, while plumes with high injection can affect the weather/climate system in broader areas. I will discuss the development of a machine learning-based wildfire plume rise emulator, trained by using a high-resolution, turbulence-resolving Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model. This work also leverages multiple satellite products, aiming at improving the representation of wildfire smoke in air quality models.