Abstract
Dry deposition of aerosols from the atmosphere is an important but
poorly understood and inadequately modeled process in atmospheric
systems for climate and air quality. Comparisons of currently used
aerosol dry deposition models to a compendia of published field
measurement studies in various landscapes show very poor agreement over
a wide range of particle sizes. In this study, we develop and test a new
aerosol dry deposition model that is a modification of the current model
in the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model that agrees much
better with measured dry deposition velocities across particle sizes.
The key innovation is the addition of a second inertial impaction term
for microscale obstacles such as leaf hairs, microscale ridges, and
needleleaf edge effects. The most significant effect of the new model is
to increase the mass dry deposition of the accumulation mode aerosols in
CMAQ. Accumulation mode mass dry deposition velocities increase by
almost an order of magnitude in forested areas with lesser increases for
shorter vegetation. Peak PM2.5 concentrations are
reduced in some forested areas by up to 40% in CMAQ simulations. Over
the continuous United States, the new model reduced
PM2.5 by an average of 16% for July 2018 at the Air
Quality System monitoring sites. For summer 2018 simulations, bias and
error of PM2.5 concentrations are significantly reduced,
especially in forested areas.