What's Our Understanding of Asian Aerosols and Its Climate and Air Pollution Impacts?

Aerosols are ubiquitous components of the atmosphere that are linked to various adverse impacts including increased health risks, visibility degradation, alteration of cloud properties and changing climate patterns on local, regional and global scales. The past decade has witnessed a significant growth in Asian emissions causing a great concern for air quality and climate.  In this paper we compare simulated aerosol distributions with observations from project ABC and other networks. As the underlying uncertainties associated with emissions, meteorology and various chemical processes in CTMs are large, we explore how well we can constrain aerosol distributions by integrating measurements and models. The seasonal and regional variation of aerosol  composition and amount are discussed along with the source sector contributions.  The impacts of the aerosols on regional weather and radiative forcing are discussed along with implications for policies directed at reducing short lived climate forcing agents.