At this year’s StuMeTa in Karlsruhe, I had the opportunity to attend an ICON-ART workshop. The ART-extension describes an atmospheric component of ICON to model aerosols and reactive gases. The DWD uses it, for example, to predict pollen exposure in Germany.

Using auto-icon to streamline the setup process, we, led by Dr. Rumeng Li, ran 1-day global ICON-ART simulations, obviously focussing on aerosol-related stuff, like dust concentration: The spike in dust concentration above the Saharian desert is clearly visible.

Later, we evaluated the model prediction by comparing it to MODIS satellite data: However, since we just ran the model for a single day, its spin-up period wasn’t over yet, so there’re still some visible artefacts, such as the columns south of strong emission zones in North Africa.