PhD position on interactive aerosols for radiation and microphysics
Météo-France/Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques, Toulouse, France
Closing date: 2 June 2025
CNRM offers a 3-year PhD position on improving numerical weather prediction with interactive aerosols for radiation and microphysics.
Objectives
The main objective of this project is to inform future choices of operational chains for taking aerosols into account, taking advantage of current and existing work. It will involve setting up and objectively evaluating several AROME configurations with interactive aerosols.
This work should ultimately answer the following question: What complexity is needed in the description of aerosols to improve forecasts, taking into account their interactions with radiation and microphysics?
Details
A first aspect of the project will be to evaluate the representation of mass aerosol distributions provided by the CAMS and MOCAGE aerosol forecast models. A fundamental point will then be to evaluate the conversion into number distributions required for microphysics. The contribution of an on-line representation of aerosols including processes such as sedimentation or aerosol leaching by the ACLIB library will then be assessed.
Comparisons with observations from campaigns sampling aerosol hygroscopicity and distributions such as SOFOG-3D, Burnet et al.,2020 or HYMEX, Ducrocq et al., 2016 will be used to carry out these assessments.
A second component will assess the interaction of aerosols with radiation and microphysics. The interaction with radiation is carried out via the EcRAD software (Hogan, 2016). Interaction with microphysics operates through the one-moment ICE3 (Pinty and Jabouille, 1998) or two-moment LIMA (Vié et , 2016) microphysics scheme. In particular, we will focus on the representation of the aerosol hydrometeor activation process by evaluating existing parameterizations such as Vié et al., 2016 or Martín Pérez et al., 2024. The evaluation will also be based on observations from measurement campaigns for microphysics. High-stakes cases will be studied and long statistics evaluated using perennial measurements from cloudnet stations (Illingworth et al., 2007), polarimetric radars and ground observation stations for radiation. An evaluation in a configuration similar to the operational one will then be based on the usual set of scores for surface and altitude parameters.