NOx-Ox-HC-aerosol

Variable Tropopause

25-Sep-2007

1. Note that the implementation of the variable tropopause is buggy in versions prior to GEOS-Chem v7-04-12. If you are using versions prior to v7-04-12, you should turn the variable tropopause OFF.
2. Jennifer Logan (see correspondence below) suggested that we should cap the variable tropopause at 200hPa in near-polar regions (90-60S and 60-90N), to avoid the problem with anomalously high tropopause heights at high latitudes. This fix was not in v7-04-12, but will be implemented into GEOS-Chem internal version v7-04-13.

Jennifer Logan (jlogan@seas.harvard.edu) wrote:

After looking at the two papers I sent, I think we should restrict the tropopause at latitudes > 60 deg. to pressures greater than 200 mb (about 11 km). From Fig. 3 in Seidel and Randel, there are tropopause (TP) heights as high as 13.5 km in the Antarctic (median height is ~9.8 km, 250 mb), but I don't think we want to be doing trop. chem there. The median TP pressure at ~80 N is ~300 mb, compared to ~250 mb at 70-85 S. The extratropical TP heights are higher (lower pressure) in the SH than in the NH according to Fig. 3.

This approach is also very easy to explain in a paper.

Jennifer

Other errors in SMVGEAR

• Click HERE for a description of the SMVGEAR bug that caused concentrations of certain tracers in STT to go to zero. This bug was fixed by May Fu and Philippe Le Sager.
• Lok Lamsal reported a bug with NaN's in SMVGEAR. Bob Yantosca recommended a fix for this error. Click HERE to visit the discussion in the Bug Fixes Forum.