A mathematical model has been developed for the dispersion of plumes originating from major fires. We have refined the model for the early evolution of the fire plumes; such a module has not been previously presented. We have evaluated the model against experimental field-scale data. The predicted concentrations agreed well with the aircraft measurements. We have also compiled an operational version of the model, which can be used for emergency contingency planning in the case of major fires.

We developed an Earth system model (ESM) diagnostics package to compare various types of aerosol properties simulated in ESMs with aircraft, ship, and surface measurements from six field campaigns across spatial scales. The diagnostics package is coded and organized to be flexible and modular for future extension to other field campaign datasets and adapted to higher-resolution model simulations. Future releases will include comprehensive cloud and aerosol–cloud interaction diagnostics.

For air quality modeling studies, it is very important to distribute pollutants correctly into the model system. This has not yet been done for shipping pollution in great detail. We studied the effects of different vertical distributions of shipping pollutants on the urban air quality and derived advanced formulas for it. These formulas take weather conditions and ship-specific parameters like the exhaust gas temperature into account.

An ENSO deep learning forecast model (ENSO-MC) is built to simulate the spatial evolution of sea surface temperature, analyse the precursor and identify the sensitive area. The results reveal the pronounced subsurface features before different types of events and indicate that oceanic thermal anomaly in the central and western Pacific provides a key long-term memory for predictions, demonstrating the potential usage of the ENSO-MC model in simulation, understanding and observations of ENSO.

We evaluate the skill of the WRF-Chem model to perform high-resolution air quality forecasts (including ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and fine particulate matter) over the Eastern Mediterranean, during winter and summer. We compare the forecast output to observational data from background and urban locations and the forecast output from CAMS. WRF-Chem was found to forecast the concentrations and diurnal profiles of gas-phase pollutants in urban areas with higher accuracy.

A scale-dependent error growth described by a power law or by a quadratic hypothesis is studied in Lorenz’s system with three spatiotemporal levels. The validity of power law is extended by including a saturation effect. The quadratic hypothesis can only serve as a first guess. In addition, we study the initial error growth for the ECMWF forecast system. Fitting the parameters, we conclude that there is an intrinsic limit of predictability after 22 days.

Human-controlled reservoirs have a large influence on the global water cycle. However, dam operations are rarely represented in Earth system models. We implement and evaluate a widely used reservoir parametrization in a global river-routing model. Using observations of individual reservoirs, the reservoir scheme outperforms the natural lake scheme. However, both schemes show a similar performance due to biases in runoff timing and magnitude when using simulated runoff.

A new environmental modelling system has been developed to represent the effect of feedbacks between atmosphere, land, and ocean in the Indian region. Different approaches to simulating tropical cyclones Titli and Fani are demonstrated. It is shown that results are sensitive to the way in which the ocean response to cyclone evolution is captured in the system. Notably, we show how a more rigorous formulation for the near-surface energy budget can be included when air–sea coupling is included.

We present an application of a hybrid deep learning (DL) model on prediction of surface CO in China from 2015 to 2020, which utilizes both convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory neural networks. The DL model performance is better than a Kalman filter (KF) system in the training period (2005–2018). Furthermore, the DL model demonstrates good temporal extensibility: the mean bias and correlation coefficients are 95.7 ppb and 0.93 in the test period (2019–2020) over eastern China.

A new emission input dataset that incorporates nitrogen isotopes has been used in the CMAQ (Community Multiscale Air Quality) modeling system simulation to qualitatively analyze the changes in δ¹⁵N values, due to the dispersion, mixing, and transport of the atmospheric NO_x emitted from different sources. The dispersion, mixing, and transport of the atmospheric NO_x were based on the meteorology files generated from the WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) model.

In this paper, the inclusion of tides in a global model via the explicit calculation of the tide-generating force based on the positions of the sun and moon is proposed, rather than the traditional method of including about eight tidal constituents with empirical amplitudes and frequencies. The new scheme can better simulate the diurnal and spatial characteristics of the tidal potential of spring and neap tides as well as the spatial patterns and magnitudes of major tidal constituents.

The lake model FLake was coupled to the ORCHIDEE land surface model to simulate lake energy balance at global scale with a multi-tile approach. Several simulations were performed with various atmospheric reanalyses and different lake depth parameterizations. The simulated lake surface temperature showed good agreement with observations (RMSEs of the order of 3 °C). We showed the large impact of the atmospheric forcing on lake temperature. We highlighted systematic errors on ice cover phenology.