Benchmarking stiff ODE solvers for atmorspheric chemistry problems I: implicit versus explicit

[NM-R 9603] In many applications of atmospheric transport-chemistry problems, a major task is the numerical integration of the stiff systems of ordinary differential equations describing the chemical transformations. This paper presents a comprehensive numerical comparison between five explicit and four implicit solvers for a set of seven benchmark problems from actual applications. The results presented may constitute a guide for atmospheric modelers to select a suitable integrator based on the type and dimension of their chemical mechanism and on the desired level of accuracy. Furthermore, we would like to consider this paper an open invitation for other groups to add new representative test problems to those described here and to benchmark their numerical algorithms in our standard computational environment.