Tropospheric chemistry in the Integrated Forecasting System of ECMWF

Abstract

A representation of atmospheric chemistry has been included in the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). The new chemistry modules complement the aerosol modules of the IFS for atmospheric composition, which is named C-IFS. C-IFS for chemistry supersedes a coupled system in which chemical transport model (CTM) Model for OZone and Related chemical Tracers 3 was two-way coupled to the IFS (IFS-MOZART). This paper contains a description of the new on-line implementation, an evaluation with observations and a comparison of the performance of C-IFS with MOZART and with a re-analysis of atmospheric composition produced by IFS-MOZART within the Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate (MACC) project. The chemical mechanism of C-IFS is an extended version of the Carbon Bond 2005 (CB05) chemical mechanism as implemented in CTM Transport Model 5 (TM5). CB05 describes tropospheric chemistry with 54 species and 126 reactions. Wet deposition and lightning nitrogen monoxide (NO) emissions are modelled in C-IFS using the detailed input of the IFS physics package. A 1 year simulation by C-IFS, MOZART and the MACC re-analysis is evaluated against ozonesondes, carbon monoxide (CO) aircraft profiles, European surface observations of ozone (O₃), CO, sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) as well as satellite retrievals of CO, tropospheric NO₂ and formaldehyde. Anthropogenic emissions from the MACC/CityZen (MACCity) inventory and biomass burning emissions from the Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS) data set were used in the simulations by both C-IFS and MOZART. C-IFS (CB05) showed an improved performance with respect to MOZART for CO, upper tropospheric O₃, and wintertime SO₂, and was of a similar accuracy for other evaluated species. C-IFS (CB05) is about 10 times more computationally efficient than IFS-MOZART.