Short-term aerosol radiative effects and their regional difference during heavy haze episodes in January 2013 in China

Short-term direct effects of aerosols on surface shortwave radiation and its regional difference during heavy haze episodes in January 2013 in China are investigated using the offline Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) - the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ)- second Sun-Edward-Slingo radiative transfer (SES2) model system. The aerosol concentrations are first generated using the WRF-CMAQ model simulations and then corrected based on the observed concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5. The atmospheric profile data produced by the WRF model and the corrected aerosol concentrations are used as inputs to the SES2 model to calculate the global horizontal irradiance (GHI) and direct solar irradiance (DIR) at the surface for a period of heavy haze episodes in January 2013 in China. The effects of aerosol on the GHI and DIR at the surface are then analyzed. The modeled radiation is evaluated against the observations first and the results show some improvement due to the correction for the aerosol concentrations. The aerosol shortwave radiative effects are determined by the difference between the model calculations with and without the inclusion of aerosols. It is found that the short-term aerosol radiative impacts during heavy haze days are very large, range between 100 and 500 W m-2. The aerosol concentrations have a large spatial variation with the highest concentration occurring in the areas of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, which causes a large difference in the radiative effect nation wide. In addition to the total concentration, the aerosol vertical distributions s also vary from the north to south in China and this leads to a significant difference in radiative effect even when the PM10 concentration is similar at three regions.