WRF-Chem SIMULATION OF A SAHARAN DUST OUTBREAK OVER THE MEDITERRANEAN REGIONS.

A fully coupled meteorology-chemistry-aerosol model (WRF-Chem) is applied to simulate the Saharan dust intrusion over the Mediterranean regions. The GOCART/AFWA dust emission scheme and the GOCART aerosol model are adopted in the simulation to investigate the average spatial pattern of the dust aerosol, with particular attention to the time average Aerosol Optical Depth. This preliminary analysis shows that the GOCART/AFWA dust emission scheme reproduce quite well the spatial pattern of this quantity, but need a further calibration of its several tuning parameters