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Tropospheric transport differences between models using the same large‐scale meteorological fields
Author(s) -
Orbe Clara,
Waugh Darryn W.,
Yang Huang,
Lamarque JeanFrancois,
Tilmes Simone,
Kinnison Douglas E.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1002/2016gl071339
Subject(s) - troposphere , convection , environmental science , scale (ratio) , meteorology , flow (mathematics) , atmospheric sciences , general circulation model , climatology , geology , climate change , physics , mechanics , oceanography , quantum mechanics
Abstract The transport of chemicals is a major uncertainty in the modeling of tropospheric composition. A common approach is to transport gases using the winds from meteorological analyses, either using them directly in a chemical transport model or by constraining the flow in a general circulation model. Here we compare the transport of idealized tracers in several different models that use the same meteorological fields taken from Modern‐Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA). We show that, even though the models use the same meteorological fields, there are substantial differences in their global‐scale tropospheric transport related to large differences in parameterized convection between the simulations. Furthermore, we find that the transport differences between simulations constrained with the same‐large scale flow are larger than differences between free‐running simulations, which have differing large‐scale flow but much more similar convective mass fluxes. Our results indicate that more attention needs to be paid to convective parameterizations in order to understand large‐scale tropospheric transport in models, particularly in simulations constrained with analyzed winds.