Diamond-NICAM-SPRINTARS: downscaling and simulation results

As a part of initiative "Research Program on Climate Change Adaptation" (RECCA) which investigates how predicted large-scale climate change may affect a local weather, and further examines possible atmospheric hazards that cities may encounter due to such a climate change, thus to guide policy makers on implementing new environmental measures, a "Development of Seamless Chemical AssimiLation System and its Application for Atmospheric Environmental Materials" (SALSA) project is funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and is focused on creating a regional (local) scale assimilation system that can accurately recreate and predict a transport of carbon dioxide and other air pollutants. In this study, a regional model of the next generation global cloud-resolving model NICAM (Non-hydrostatic ICosahedral Atmospheric Model) (Tomita and Satoh, 2004) is used and ran together with a transport model SPRINTARS (Spectral Radiation Transport Model for Aerosol Species) (Takemura et al, 2000) and a chemical transport model CHASER (Sudo et al, 2002) to simulate aerosols across urban cities (over a Kanto region including metropolitan Tokyo). The presentation will mainly be on a "Diamond-NICAM" (Figure 1), a regional climate model version of the global climate model NICAM, and its dynamical downscaling methodologies. Originally, a global NICAM can be described as twenty identical equilateral triangular-shaped panels covering the entire globe where grid points are at the corners of those panels, and to increase a resolution (called a "global-level" in NICAM), additional points are added at the middle of existing two adjacent points, so a number of panels increases by fourfold with an increment of one global-level. On the other hand, a Diamond-NICAM only uses two of those initial triangular-shaped panels, thus only covers part of the globe. In addition, NICAM uses an adaptive mesh scheme and its grid size can gradually decrease, as the grid points get closer to the point of focus. This "stretching" strength of grid points is called a "stretching ratio", and allows a Diamond-NICAM to adjust its domain size. Also, this eliminates a need for the multiple nesting as a grid size gradually and smoothly changes in the global NICAM. Area of Diamond-NICAM-SPRINTARS when g-level is set at 7 with a stretching ratio of 100.