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The atmospheric dust cycle, as an integral part of the Earth System, plays an important role in the Earths energy balance by both direct and indirect ways. Due to the complexity of the modeling of the dust cycle, large uncertainties still excites in most of the global models due to the dependence on the physical, chemical and biological properties of the dust particles. In my research, the main goal is to minimize the uncertainties in the EMAC atmospheric chemistry GCM, with a focus on the dust cycle. The model performance will be evaluated in each stage of the dust cycle from emissions, transport, and interaction with other aerosols to deposition. Many improvements are subjected to be implemented for better representation of the dust cycle in the earth system. As a first stage my research, this study presents an evaluation of the atmospheric mineral dust cycle in an atmospheric Chemistry General Circulation Model (AC-GCM) using a newly physically consistent dust emission scheme (Astitha et al., 2012). We used the the ECHAM5 - Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy) (Jockel et al., 2010) AC-GCM simulations at T106 spectral resolution and 31 vertical levels. Microphysical processes are simulated using the GMXe submodel and simple sulphur chemical reactions were simulated following Gläser et al. (2012) to allow hygroscopic growth of dust particles. |
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