Skip to content

Back to parent page - Aerosol nucleation


Parameteric sensitivity test for binary nucleation

The test shown here illustrate the sensitivity of MAM's binary nucleation rate to air temperature (T) and relative humidity (RH). The parameterization is from Vehkamaki et al. (2002, 2013) and is described on this page.

Test driver

The test driver file is skywalker_mam_test_newnuc.F90 in the mam_refactor code repository, located under standalone/tests/nucleation/.

This test driver exercises subroutine mer07_veh02_wang08_nuc_1box in MAM's aerosol microphysics code package which in term calls the binary, ternary nucleation, and/or PBL nucleation subroutines in the mam_refactor repository. Which nucleation parameterization is actually tested depends on the input parameters.

Input parameters

Input parameters are specified using YAML files stored in the mam_x_validation repository. The YAML files are imported to each clone of the mam_refactor repository as part of a submodule. The YAML file for the test described here is standalone/tests/mam_x_validation/nucleation/vehkamaki2002_contour.yaml

Test output: data and plots

After executing the verification tests, the output data and plots can be found in your build directory under standalone/tests/nucleation/.

The plot is generated by the script standalone/tests/mam_x_validation/nucleation/generate_plots.py.

Reference results

Binary nucleation rates under a fixed sulfric acid gas concentration of 5E8/cc

mam_vehkamaki2002_contour.png

Back to top