Toward Fine Horizontal Resolution Global Simulations of Aerosol Sectional Microphysics: Advances Enabled by GCHP‐TOMAS.

Global modeling of aerosol‐particle number and size is important for understanding aerosol effects on Earth's climate and air quality. Fine‐resolution global models are desirable for representing nonlinear aerosol‐microphysical processes, their nonlinear interactions with dynamics and chemistry, and spatial heterogeneity. However, aerosol‐microphysical simulations are computationally demanding, which can limit the achievable global horizontal resolution. Here, we present the first coupling of the TwO‐Moment Aerosol Sectional (TOMAS) microphysics scheme with the High‐Performance configuration of the GEOS‐Chem model of atmospheric composition (GCHP), a coupling termed GCHP‐TOMAS. GCHP's architecture allows massively parallel GCHP‐TOMAS simulations including on the cloud, using hundreds of computing cores, faster runtimes, more memory, and finer global horizontal resolution (e.g., 25 km × 25 km, 7.8 × 105 model columns) versus the previous single‐node capability of GEOS‐Chem‐TOMAS (tens of cores, 200 km × 250 km, 1.3 × 104 model columns). GCHP‐TOMAS runtimes have near‐ideal scalability with computing‐core number. Simulated global‐mean number concentrations increase (dominated by free‐tropospheric over‐ocean sub‐10‐nm‐diameter particles) toward finer GCHP‐TOMAS horizontal resolution. Increasing the horizontal resolution from 200 km × 200–50 km × 50 km increases the global monthly mean free‐tropospheric total particle number by 18.5%, and over‐ocean sub‐10‐nm‐diameter particles by 39.8% at 4‐km altitude. With a cascade of contributing factors, free‐tropospheric particle‐precursor concentrations increase (32.6% at 4‐km altitude) with resolution, promoting new‐particle formation and growth that outweigh coagulation changes. These nonlinear effects have the potential to revise current understanding of processes controlling global aerosol number and aerosol impacts on Earth's climate and air quality. Plain Language Summary: Small particles in the air have important effects on Earth's climate and air quality. Representing the number and size of these particles in global models is challenging because their processes are complex. This factor has often limited global‐model horizontal resolution because fine global resolution models (e.g., 25 km × 25 km or smaller) generally ran too slowly but would be useful for representing details missed at traditional coarse resolution (e.g., 200 km × 250 km). We start with a detailed particle scheme that previously only ran at coarse global resolution because fine resolution would take too long. We present the initial use of this scheme in an updated model version, with a structure allowing a fast‐running, high‐memory model with fine resolution, by using hundreds to thousands of computer cores. In the updated structure, model speed increases with the number of cores used. We find that the total number of particles in the model is more with fine compared to coarse model resolution. These increases are most in Earth's remote regions and for particles which come from gas. Using fine model resolution globally when representing particles could change our understanding of how they impact Earth's climate and air quality. Key Points: We couple aerosol microphysics with GEOS‐Chem's High‐Performance configuration for fine (25 km × 25 km) global‐resolution capabilityGlobal‐mean aerosol number increases with model resolution, dominated by particles smaller than 10 nm in the over‐ocean free troposphereToward finer horizontal resolution, enhanced particle precursor loading in the free troposphere promotes particle formation and growth [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]