The GOddard SnoW Impurity Module (GOSWIM) for the NASA GEOS-5 Earth System Model: Preliminary Comparisons with Observations in Sapporo, Japan

Abstract

The snow darkening module evaluating dust, black carbon (BC), and organic carbon (OC) depositions on the mass of snow impurities and albedo has been developed for the NASA Goddard Earth Observing System, Version 5 (GEOS-5) Earth System Model, as the GOddard SnoW Impurity Module (GOSWIM). GOSWIM consists of the updated snow albedo scheme from a previous study (Yasunari et al. 2011) and a newly developed mass concentration calculation scheme, directly using aerosol depositions from the chemical transport model (GOCART) in GEOS-5. Compared to observations at Sapporo, the off-line simulations, forced by observation-based meteorology and aerosol depositions from GOES-5, reasonably simulated the seasonal migration of snow depth, albedos, and impurities of dust, BC, and OC in the snow surface. However, the simulated dust and BC mass concentrations in snow were especially underestimated except for the BC in the early winter, compared to the observations. Increasing the deposition rates of dust and BC could explain the observations. Removing BC deposition could possibly lead to an extension of snow cover duration in Sapporo of four days. Comparing the off-line GOSWIM and the GEOS-5 global simulations, we found that determining better local precipitation and deposition rates of the aerosols are key factors in generating better GOSWIM snow darkening simulation in NASA GEOS-5.