Identification

Title

Toward a comprehensive global electric circuit model: Atmospheric conductivity and its variability in CESM1(WACCM) model simulations

Abstract

As an important step in further modeling and understanding the global electric circuit, the Community Earth System Model (CESM1) has been extended to provide a calculation of conductivity in the troposphere and stratosphere. Conductivity depends on ion mobility and ion concentration, the latter being controlled by a number of ion production and loss processes. This leads to a complex dependency of conductivity on most importantly galactic cosmic ray flux, radon emissions from the Earth's surface, aerosol number concentrations, clouds, and temperature. To cover this variety in parameters for calculating and evaluating conductivity, an Earth system model is extremely useful. Here the extension of CESM1 to calculate conductivity is described, and the results are discussed with a focus on their spatial and temporal variabilities. The results are also compared to balloon and aircraft measurements, and good agreement is found for undisturbed conditions and during a solar proton event. The conductivity model implementation is a significant improvement to previous studies because of the high-quality, high-resolution model data input. Notably, the aerosol representation provided by off-line calculations of tropospheric and stratospheric aerosol using the Community Aerosol and Radiation Model for Atmospheres as part of CESM1(WACCM) (Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model) provides a realistic computation of the impact of the background aerosol distribution for the first time. In addition to the novel high-resolution information on conductivity, it is found that an intra-annual cycle exists in the total global resistance, varying between 220 and 245Ω. The model shows that this cycle is driven equally by seasonal aerosol and cloud variations.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7zs2xd2

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2013-08-27T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact