Added Value of Aerosol-Cloud Interactions for Representing Aerosol Optical Depth in an Online Coupled Climate-Chemistry Model over Europe

Aerosol-cloud interactions (ACI) represent one of the most important sources of uncertainties in climate modelling. In this sense, realistic simulations of ACI are needed for a better understanding of the complex interactions between air pollution and the climate system. This work quantifies the added value of including ACI in an online coupled climate/chemistry model (WRF-Chem, 0.44 degrees horizontal resolution, years 2003 to 2010) in order to assess whether there is an improvement in the representation of aerosol optical depth (AOD). Modelling results for each species have been evaluated against the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) reanalysis, and AOD at 675 nm has been compared to AERONET data. Results indicate that the improvements of the monthly biases are around 8% for total AOD550 when including ACI, reaching 20% for the monthly bias in AOD550 coming from dust. Moreover, the temporal representation of AOD550 largely improves (increase in the Pearson time correlation coefficients), ranging from 6% to 20% depending on the chemical species considered. The benefits from this improvement overcome the problems derived from the high computational time required in ACI simulations (eight times higher with respect to simulations not including aerosol-cloud interactions).