A dust deflation module was developed and coupled with the air quality modeling system RAMS-CMAQ to simultaneously treat all the major tropospheric aerosols（i.e.,organic and black carbons,sulfate,nitrate, ammonia,soil dust,and sea salt）.Then the coupled system was applied to East Asia to simulate Asian dust aerosol generation,transport and dry/wet removal processes during 14-25 March 2002 when two strong dust storms occurred consecutively.To evaluate model performance and to analyze the observed features of dust aerosols over the East Asian region,model results were compared to concentrations of suspended particulate matter of 10μm or less(PM;;1-h intervals) at four remote Japanese stations and daily air pollution index （API） values for PM;at four large Chinese cities.The modeled values were generally in good agreement with observed data,and the model reasonably reproduced two dust storm outbreaks and generally predicted the dust onset and cessation times at each observation site.In addition,hourly averaged values of aerosol optical thickness（AOT） were calculated and compared with observations at four Aerosol Robotic Network （AERONET） stations to assess the model’s capability of estimating dust aerosol column burden.Analysis shows that modeled and observed AOT values were generally comparable and that the contribution of dust aerosols to AOT was significant only with regard to their source regions and their transport paths.
The air quality model system RAMS （Regional Atmospheric Modeling System）-CMAQ （Models-3 Com- munity Multi-scale Air Quality） coupled with an aerosol optical/radiative module was applied to investigate the impact of different aerosol mixing states （i.e., externally mixed, half externally and half internally mixed, and internally mixed） oil radiative forcing in East Asia. The simulation results show that the aerosol optical depth （AOD） generally increased when the aerosol mixing state changed from externally mixed to internally mixed, while the single scattering albedo （SSA） decreased. Therefore, the scattering and absorption proper- ties of aerosols can be significantly affected by the change of aerosol mixing states. Comparison of simulated and observed SSAs at five AERONET （Aerosol Robotic Network） sites suggests that SSA could be better estimated by considering aerosol particles to be internally mixed. Model analysis indicates that the impact of aerosol mixing state upon aerosol direct radiative forcing （DRF） is complex. Generally, the cooling effect of aerosols over East Asia are enhanced in the northern part of East Asia （Northern China, Korean peninsula, and the surrounding area of Japan） and are reduced in the southern part of East. Asia （Sichuan Basin and Southeast China） by internal mixing process, and the variation range can reach ＋5 W m 2. The analysis shows that the internal mixing between inorganic salt and dust is likely the main reason that the cooling effect strengthens. Conversely, the internal nfixture of anthropogenic aerosols, including sulfate, nitrate, ammonium, black carbon, and organic carbon, could obviously weaken the cooling effect.
