An international team including researchers from CONICET, Argentina’s national scientific research council, has developed an important update to one of the world’s most widely used climate models, the open-source Community Earth System Model version 2 (CESM2). The work was led by Rafael Fernandez of the Interdisciplinary Institute of Basic Sciences (CONICET-UNCUYO) in Mendoza.
The new version, called CESM2-SLH, includes a detailed representation of short-lived halogens, compounds of chlorine, bromine and iodine. It covers natural and human sources, how these gases are recycled and react on particles in the atmosphere, and how they are removed.
The work built on more than 15 years of research and took over three years of development, testing and review. The model’s output was checked against measurements from research ships and ozone sondes. The paper was published in Geoscientific Model Development.
The code and technical documentation are already available to the international research community, so that other groups can use the same approach in other models.
