Toward the Construction of Chemical Weather Map
- Atmospheric Composition and Global/Regional Change -
Hajime Akimoto
Frontier Research System for Global Change (FRSGC)
Tokyo, Japan
Immediate target of atmospheric composition research group is to construct chemical weather map and/or chemical climate map for illustrating spatial distributions and temporal changes of atmospheric trace species which are of importance in the global/regional change of climate and air quality. The purpose of drawing chemical weather/climate map is to quantify sources and sinks of atmospheric species, e.g. greenhouse gases, reactive gases and aerosols for evaluating global environmental changes. In order to draw chemical weather/climate map, processes of sources/sinks and chemical transformation have to be incorporated into physical weather/climate processes that characterize mixing and transport.
Today, I will focus more of my talk on a regional chemical-transport model applied to Northeast Asia. Rapid growth of economy in China is now affecting the regional as well as global atmosphere in various aspects. High emission of SO2 in China exerted adverse effect on forest ecosystem health there, caused by acidification of rain and fog water, as well as direct human health effect by SO2 itself and aerosols. On the other hand, aerosols have had cooling effect resulting in alleviation of warming in a regional scale. It should be noted, however, major air pollutant in China is now changing rather rapidly from SO2 to NOx due to sulfur control policy and increase of number of automobiles. Increase of NOx causes photochemical smog as well as health effect by NO2 itself. Photochemical build-up of ozone in regional scale brings high level of ozone to our country, which may jeopardize ecosystem health. Substantial radiative forcing by the increase of tropospheric ozone will accelerate warming by compensating the cooling effect of aerosols.
In order to evaluate such regional climate and air quality change, regional chemical-transport model based on RAMS/CMAQ is now being developed and will be demonstrated in this talk.
