Inverting the East Asian Dust Emission Fluxes Using the Ensemble Kalman Smoother and Himawari-8 AODs: A Case Study with WRF-Chem v3.5.1

Abstract

We present the inversions (back-calculations or optimizations) of dust emissions for a severe winter dust event over East Asia in November 2016. The inversion system based on a fixed-lag ensemble Kalman smoother is newly implemented in the Weather Research and Forecasting model and is coupled with Chemistry (WRF-Chem). The assimilated observations are the hourly aerosol optical depths (AODs) from the next-generation geostationary satellite Himawari-8. The posterior total dust emissions (2.59 Tg) for this event are 3.8 times higher than the priori total dust emissions (0.68 Tg) during 25–27 November 2016. The net result is that the simulated aerosol horizontal and vertical distributions are both in better agreement with the assimilated Himawari-8 observations and independent observations from the ground-based AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET), the satellite-based Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO). The developed emission inversion approach, combined with the geostationary satellite observations, can be very helpful for properly estimating the Asian dust emissions.