Application of the Multi-Scale Infrastructure for Chemistry and Aerosols (MUSICA) over Africa

The Multi-Scale Infrastructure for Chemistry and Aerosols (MUSICA) is a new community modeling infrastructure developed by the Atmospheric Chemistry Observations and Modeling (ACOM) Laboratory at NCAR together with the atmospheric chemistry community. MUSICA enables the study of atmospheric composition and chemistry across all relevant scales. Africa is one of the most rapidly changing regions in the world and air pollution is a growing issue at multiple scales over the continent. We have developed a MUSICA grid specifically for atmospheric chemistry research over Africa. The model configuration has a refined resolution over Africa (~28 km) while still containing a global domain (~1-degree resolution). The model configuration also includes carbon monoxide (CO) tracers to indicate the source regions (West Africa, South Africa, North Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and inflow from outside the continent) and source types (anthropogenic, fire, and waste burning) to the air pollution over Africa. We have run the model for the whole year of 2017 and compared our MUSICA results with a Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) simulation over Africa (~20 km resolution). The preliminary results show that the performance of MUSICA is comparable to WRF-Chem when evaluated with in situ observations of CO. In addition, as the in situ observations over Africa are limited, we also evaluate the MUSICA model results using satellite products. Specifically, we compare the model results to CO from the Measurement of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O3) from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI).