ISORROPIA-Lite: A Comprehensive Atmospheric Aerosol Thermodynamics Module for Earth System Models

Aerosol simulations especially for Earth System Models require a thermodynamics module with a good compromise between rigor and computational efficiency. We present and evaluate ISORROPIA-lite, an accelerated and simplified version of the widely used ISORROPIA-II v.2.3 aerosol thermodynamics model, expanded to include the effects of water uptake from organics and an updated interface communicating simulation diagnostics and information. ISORROPIA-lite assumes the aerosol is in metastable equilibrium (i.e., salts do not precipitate from supersaturated solutions) and treats the thermodynamics of Na⁺–NH₄⁺–SO₄^2––NO₃^––Cl^––Ca²⁺–K⁺–Mg²⁺–Organics–H₂O aerosol using binary activity coefficients from precalculated look-up tables. Off-line comparison between ISORROPIA-II and ISORROPIA-lite (without organic water effects) for more than 330,000 atmospherically-relevant states demonstrated that i) ISORROPIA-lite provides virtually identical results with ISORROPIA-II in metastable mode and ii) differences between stable mode ISORROPIA-II and ISORROPIA-lite are less than 25% for the concentrations of the various semivolatile aerosol components and similar to the differences between stable and metastable modes of ISORROPIA-II. Using ISORROPIA-lite reduced computational cost by 35% compared to ISORROPIA-II simulations in stable mode with online calculation of binary activity coefficients. Application of ISORROPIA-lite in the PMCAMx chemical transport model accelerated the 3D simulations by about 10% compared to using ISORROPIA-II in stable mode with changes in the concentrations of the major aerosol components of less than 10%. Simulations considering the effects of the organic aerosol water did not slow down ISORROPIA-lite but increased the concentrations of the inorganic semivolatile components especially at nighttime. Organic water could highly contribute to the total PM₁ water mass and increase the concentrations of fine nitrate and ammonium by as much as 1 μg m^–3 in places where the organic aerosol and RH levels are high.