[RegCNET] Aerosol Optical Depth in dust simulation

[Carolina Cavazos Guerra]

Dear RegCM users. 

I used RegCM3 some time ago and now I'm trying to use RegCM4.3 again for some dust simulations over Africa. 

I managed to run some dust simulations using the new chem following the recommended steps in the users guide and posts made recently on the RegCNET pages. First, I copied over the namelist from one of the examples for dust in the Testing folder contained in the last RegCM4.3 version. My chemparam stanza looks as follows

&chemparam
 idirect   =  2,
 chemsimtype = 'DUST   ',
 ichsolver = 1,
 ichdustemd = 2,
 ichsursrc = 1,
 ichcumtra = 1,
 ichdrdepo = 1,
 ichremlsc = 1,
 ichremcvc = 1,
 ichebdy=0,
 ichdiag=0, 
 /

As a first instance I am not activating the ichebdy option to generate dust boundary conditions and I wonder how much difference would this make for short runs if just enough time for spin-up is given. 

I successfully did run a short simulation and got the correspondent diagnostics in the files generated for each tracer, DUST_1, DUST_2, DUST_3 and DUST_4. However AOD is nowhere to be seen. 

Now, quoting from the users guide: The chemistry outputs consist of one netCDF file per tracer named explicitely and containing concentration fields + different diagnostics, and one netCDF file giving the optical properties of the total aerosol mixture
i.e. aerosol optical depth and radiative forcing.

I was having a look to the RAD files which indeed contains diagnostics for SW and LW radiation but still can not find AOD. I also activated the ichdiag=1 which generate extra diagnosis in case I was missing something and nothing. 

Am I missing missing something in the configuration? Any help will be very welcome. 

Best regards

Carolina

P.S. Just a last comment aside from a very personal point of view, although there seem to be some improvements in this new version RegCM4, it seems to be much less user friendly that it use to be and its becoming more and more confusing in terms of configuration. 


Dr. Carolina Cavazos-Guerra
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Department of Geography
University of Sussex
Room 142 Chichester I Building
Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QJ, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 127387 3357


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