Small but Notable Influence of Numerical Diffusion on Super Coarse Dust Sedimentation: Insights from UNO3 vs. Upwind Schemes

Mineral dust plays a vital role in the Earth’s climate system, influencing radiation, cloud formation, biogeochemical cycles, and air quality. Accurately simulating dust transport in atmospheric models remains challenging, particularly for coarse and super-coarse particles, which are often underrepresented due to limitations in model physics and numerical treatment. Observations have shown that particles larger than 20 μm can remain airborne longer than expected, suggesting that standard gravitational settling formulations may be insufficient. One potential contributor to this discrepancy is the numerical diffusion introduced by advection schemes used to model sedimentation processes. In this study, we compare the commonly used first-order upwind advection scheme, which is highly diffusive, to a third-order scheme (UNO3) that reduces numerical diffusion while maintaining computational efficiency. Using 2-D sensitivity tests, we show that UNO3 retains up to 50% more dust mass for the coarsest particles compared to the default scheme, although overall dust lifetime shows little change. In 3-D simulations of the ASKOS 2022 dust campaign, both schemes reproduced similar large-scale dust patterns, with UNO3 yielding slightly lower dust. Overall, domain-averaged dust load differences remain small (less than 2%), with minor decreases in fine dust ~3% and slight increases in coarse dust ~2%, indicating that reducing numerical diffusion modestly enhances the presence of larger particles. Near the surface, UNO3 produces a ~4% increase in dust concentration, with local differences up to 50 μg/m3. These results highlight that while numerical diffusion does affect dust transport—especially for super-coarse fractions—its impact is relatively small compared to the larger underestimation of super-coarse dust commonly observed in models compared to measurements. Addressing the fundamental physics of super-coarse dust emission and lofting may therefore be a higher priority for improving dust model fidelity than further refining advection numerics. Future studies may also consider implementing more computationally intensive schemes, such as the Prather scheme, to further minimize numerical diffusion where highly accurate size-resolved transport is critical.