Modeling of black carbon in Asia using a global-to-regional seamless aerosol-transport model

• Recent measurements of black carbon (BC) were used for model evaluation.
• Most models do not reproduce observed BC mass concentrations in China and India.
• Our developed model provides good horizontal resolution within 10–200 km.
• Our model is capable of simulating aerosols on global-to-regional scales.

In Asia, the evaluation of black carbon (BC) using global aerosol-transport models has been incomplete due to a lack of available measurements. Recently, new measurements and datasets at various Asian sites have become available for use in model validation. In this study, we compared the BC mass concentrations obtained by an aerosol-coupled global nonhydrostatic model adopting a uniform-grid system with in-situ measurements and other models over Asia. The results revealed that our model, as well as other global models, was unable to reproduce the observed BC values at most sites in China and India, most likely due to strong local hotspots. To overcome the inconsistency between the models and measurements, we developed a new aerosol-transport model using a stretched-grid system for high-resolution simulations with up to approximately 10 km grids. Our model can be used as a global-to-regional seamless aerosol-transport model for low to high horizontal resolution simulations.