Investigation of aerosol effects on temperature using the Weather Research and Forecasting model and MODIS data

Date

2025-7-25

Author

Altay, Zeynep

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

773
views

0
downloads

Cite This

This thesis investigates the effects of aerosols on surface radiation and temperature over the Türkiye region using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aerosol optical depth (AOD) data. Several simulations were conducted using different aerosol configurations, including data from MODIS, Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) climatology, constant AOD, and a control run without aerosol input. To address missing data in the MODIS dataset, different gap-filling techniques were applied, such as climatology, mean nearest neighbor, k-nearest neighbor, and gaussian processes regression. The results reveal that aerosol integration to the model generally reduces shortwave direct and downward shortwave radiation, and near surface temperature, due to scattering and absorption. Changes in longwave downward radiation varied depending on the simulation period, aerosol concentration and configuration. No consistent relationship was found between aerosol and precipitation with the current configurations. Model outputs for surface downward shortwave radiation and temperature were validated with meteorological measurements. Among all simulations, the lowest bias and root mean square error values were found in model runs with aerosol, particularly those using CAMS climatology and MODIS (filled with CAMS), and the highest errors were associated with the no-aerosol case. Overall, this study emphasizes the importance of understanding aerosol-atmosphere interactions, representing aerosols in the WRF model for improvement, and investigating various aerosol dataset performances.

Subject Keywords

WRF, MODIS, CAMS, Aerosol, Atmospheric physics, Atmosfer fiziği

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115505

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis