1. Modeling dust mineralogical composition: sensitivity to soil mineralogy atlases and their expected climate impacts
- Author
-
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament d'Enginyeria de Projectes i de la Construcció, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Gonçalves Ageitos, María, Obiso, Vincenzo, Miller, Ron L., Jorba Casellas, Oriol, Klose, Martina, Dawson, Matthew, Balkanski, Yves, Perlwitz, Jan, Basart Alpuente, Sara, di Tomaso, Enza, Escribano Alisio, Jeronimo, Macchia, Francesca, Montané Pinto, Gilbert, Mahowald, Natalie, Green, Robert, Thompson, David R., Pérez García-Pando, Carlos, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament d'Enginyeria de Projectes i de la Construcció, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Gonçalves Ageitos, María, Obiso, Vincenzo, Miller, Ron L., Jorba Casellas, Oriol, Klose, Martina, Dawson, Matthew, Balkanski, Yves, Perlwitz, Jan, Basart Alpuente, Sara, di Tomaso, Enza, Escribano Alisio, Jeronimo, Macchia, Francesca, Montané Pinto, Gilbert, Mahowald, Natalie, Green, Robert, Thompson, David R., and Pérez García-Pando, Carlos
- Abstract
Soil dust aerosols are a key component of the climate system, as they interact with short- and long-wave radiation, alter cloud formation processes, affect atmospheric chemistry and play a role in biogeochemical cycles by providing nutrient inputs such as iron and phosphorus. The influence of dust on these processes depends on its physicochemical properties, which, far from being homogeneous, are shaped by its regionally varying mineral composition. The relative amount of minerals in dust depends on the source region and shows a large geographical variability. However, many state-of-the-art Earth system models (ESMs), upon which climate analyses and projections rely, still consider dust mineralogy to be invariant. The explicit representation of minerals in ESMs is more hindered by our limited knowledge of the global soil composition along with the resulting size-resolved airborne mineralogy than by computational constraints. In this work we introduce an explicit mineralogy representation within the state-of-the-art Multiscale Online Nonhydrostatic AtmospheRe CHemistry (MONARCH) model. We review and compare two existing soil mineralogy datasets, which remain a source of uncertainty for dust mineralogy modeling and provide an evaluation of multiannual simulations against available mineralogy observations. Soil mineralogy datasets are based on measurements performed after wet sieving, which breaks the aggregates found in the parent soil. Our model predicts the emitted particle size distribution (PSD) in terms of its constituent minerals based on brittle fragmentation theory (BFT), which reconstructs the emitted mineral aggregates destroyed by wet sieving. Our simulations broadly reproduce the most abundant mineral fractions independently of the soil composition data used. Feldspars and calcite are highly sensitive to the soil mineralogy map, mainly due to the different assumptions made in each soil dataset to extrapolate a handful of soil measurements to arid and semi, This research was supported by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 framework program (grant nos. 773051, 821205, H2020-MSCA-COFUND-2016-754433, H2020-MSCA-IF-2017-789630 and H2020-MSCA-IF-2016-747048), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (grant nos. NNG14HH42I, 80NM0018D0004TS14, 80NSSC19K0056, 80NSSC19K0984, 80HQTR21CA005) as well as the EMIT project from the NASA Earth Venture Instrument program under the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate, the US DOE DE-SC0021302 project, the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain (grant no. CGL2017-88911-R), the European Space Agency (grant no. ESA AO/1-10546/20/I-NB), the Department of Research and Universities of the Government of Catalonia through the Atmospheric Composition Research Group (code 2021 SGR 01550), the Helmholtz Association (grant no. VH-NG-1533), and the AXA Research Fund through the AXA Chair on Sand and Dust Storms at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)., Peer Reviewed, Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::13 - Acció per al Clima, Postprint (published version)
- Published
- 2023