Modeling of the Mercury Cycle in the Atmosphere

The physical and chemical processes involved in the mercury cycle in the atmosphere are very complicated and need special treatment. At the framework of the EU/DG-XII project MAMCS a significant effort has been devoted for the development of appropriate models for studying the mercury cycle in the atmosphere. In addition, an improved emission inventory is created while monitoring data in various locations in Europe are selected and used for model calibration and inter-comparison. Our model development includes the incorporation of almost any type of source (point or area), gas and aqueous phase chemistry, gas-to-particle conversion, wet and dry deposition, air-water exchange processes etc. The development was performed within two well-known atmospheric modeling systems: the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) and the SKIRON/Eta. There are several reasons for performing the development of the mercury cycle modeling within these two models: The main reason for using RAMS is its unique capability of two-way interactive nesting of any number of grids which is considered as absolutely necessary for studying near-source dispersion of mercury species. Additional capabilities are the full microphysical parameterization for wet processes, the detailed parameterization of surface processes and the non-hydrostatic formulation. The main reason for using the SKIRON/Eta model for development is its unique capability of describing the dust cycle (uptake, transport, deposition) and the existence of a viscous sub-layer formulation which is necessary for description of mercury fluxes from the sea surface. In both models the mercury cycle formulation is called simultaneously at each time-step in order