Simulation of aerosol optical properties over a tropical urban site in India using a global model and its comparison with ground measurements

Abstract. Aerosols have great impacts on atmospheric environment, human health, and earth's climate. Therefore, information on their spatial and temporal distribution is of paramount importance. Despite numerous studies have examined the variation and trends of BC and AOD over India, only very few have focused on their spatial distribution or even correlating the observations with model simulations. In the present study, a three-dimensional aerosol transport-radiation model coupled with a general circulation model. SPRINTARS, simulated atmospheric aerosol distributions including BC and aerosol optical properties, i.e., aerosol optical thickness (AOT), Ångström Exponent (AE), and single scattering albedo (SSA). The simulated results are compared with both BC measurements by aethalometer and aerosol optical properties measured by ground-based skyradiometer and by satellite sensor, MODIS/Terra over Hyderabad, which is a tropical urban area of India, for the year 2008. The simulated AOT and AE in Hyderabad are found to be comparable to ground-based measured ones. The simulated SSA tends to be higher than the ground-based measurements. Both these comparisons of aerosol optical properties between the simulations with different emission inventories and the measurements indicate that, firstly the model uncertainties derived from aerosol emission inventory cannot explain the gaps between the simulations and the measurements and secondly the vertical transport of BC and the treatment of BC-containing particles can be the main issue in the global model to solve the gap.