Suchergebnisse

The large uncertainty in the mineral dust direct radiative effect (DRE) hinders projections of future climate change due to anthropogenic activity. Resolving modeled dust mineral speciation allows for spatially and temporally varying refractive indices consistent with dust aerosol composition. Here, for the first time, we quantify the range in dust DRE at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) due to current uncertainties in the surface soil mineralogical content using a dust mineral-resolving climate model. We propagate observed uncertainties in soil mineral abundances from two soil mineralogy atlases along with the optical properties of each mineral into the DRE and compare the resultant range with other sources of uncertainty across six climate models. The shortwave DRE responds region-specifically to the dust burden depending on the mineral speciation and underlying shortwave surface albedo: positively when the regionally averaged annual surface albedo is larger than 0.28 and negatively otherwise. Among all minerals examined, the shortwave TOA DRE and single scattering albedo at the 0.44–0.63 µm band are most sensitive to the fractional contribution of iron oxides to the total dust composition. The global net (shortwave plus longwave) TOA DRE is estimated to be within −0.23 to +0.35 W m−2. Approximately 97 % of this range relates to uncertainty in the soil abundance of iron oxides. Representing iron oxide with solely hematite optical properties leads to an overestimation of shortwave DRE by +0.10 W m−2 at the TOA, as goethite is not as absorbing as hematite in the shortwave spectrum range. Our study highlights the importance of iron oxides to the shortwave DRE: they have a disproportionally large impact on climate considering their small atmospheric mineral mass fractional burden (∼2 %). An improved description of iron oxides, such as those planned in the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), is thus essential for more accurate estimates of the dust DRE. ; A portion of this work was funded by the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), a NASA Earth Ventures-Instrument (EVI-4) Mission. Longlei Li, Natalie M. Mahowald, and Douglas S. Hamilton were supported by the Atkinson Centre for a Sustainable Future. Jasper F. Kok received support from NSF grant 1552519. Martina Klose received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 789630 (DUST.ES). Carlos Pérez García-Pando and Maria Gonçalves Ageitos received support from the European Research Council (grant no. 773051, FRAGMENT), EU H2020 project FORCES (grant no. 821205), the AXA Research Fund, the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (RYC-2015-18690 and NUTRIENT: CGL2017- 88911-R), and PRACE and RES for awarding access to MareNostrum at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to run MONARCH. Ron L. Miller received for support from the NASA Modeling, Analysis and Prediction Program (NNG14HH42I). ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (published version)

We present the dust module in the Multiscale Online Non-hydrostatic AtmospheRe CHemistry model (MONARCH) version 2.0, a chemical weather prediction system that can be used for regional and global modeling at a range of resolutions. The representations of dust processes in MONARCH were upgraded with a focus on dust emission (emission parameterizations, entrainment thresholds, considerations of soil moisture and surface cover), lower boundary conditions (roughness, potential dust sources), and dust–radiation interactions. MONARCH now allows modeling of global and regional mineral dust cycles using fundamentally different paradigms, ranging from strongly simplified to physics-based parameterizations. We present a detailed description of these updates along with four global benchmark simulations, which use conceptually different dust emission parameterizations, and we evaluate the simulations against observations of dust optical depth. We determine key dust parameters, such as global annual emission/deposition flux, dust loading, dust optical depth, mass-extinction efficiency, single-scattering albedo, and direct radiative effects. For dust-particle diameters up to 20¿µm, the total annual dust emission and deposition fluxes obtained with our four experiments range between about 3500 and 6000¿Tg, which largely depend upon differences in the emitted size distribution. Considering ellipsoidal particle shapes and dust refractive indices that account for size-resolved mineralogy, we estimate the global total (longwave and shortwave) dust direct radiative effect (DRE) at the surface to range between about -0.90 and -0.63¿W¿m-2 and at the top of the atmosphere between -0.20 and -0.28¿W¿m-2. Our evaluation demonstrates that MONARCH is able to reproduce key features of the spatiotemporal variability of the global dust cycle with important and insightful differences between the different configurations. ; This research has been supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 789630. Martina Klose has received funding through the Helmholtz Association's Initiative and Networking Fund (grant agreement no. VH-NG-1533). Jeronimo Escribano and Matthew L. Dawson have received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreements no. 754433 (Jeronimo Escribano) and no. 747048 (Matthew Dawson). BSC co-authors acknowledge funding from the following: the European Research Council (FRAGMENT (grant no. 773051)); the AXA Research Fund; the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (grant no. CGL2017- 88911-R); the EU H2020 project FORCES (grant no. 821205); the CMUG-CCI3-TECHPROP contract, an activity carried out under a program of and funded by the European Space Agency (ESA); and the DustClim project, which is part of ERA4CS, an ERA-NET initiated by JPI Climate and funded by FORMAS (SE), DLR (DE), BMWFW (AT), IFD (DK), MINECO (ES), and ANR (FR), with cofunding by the European Union (grant no. 690462). Ron L. Miller is funded by the NASA Modeling, Analysis and Prediction Program (NNG14HH42I). Jasper F. Kok acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant nos. 1552519 and 1856389 and the Army Research Office (grant no. W911NF-20- 2-0150). Yue Huang has received funding from the Columbia University Earth Institute Postdoctoral Research Fellowship and from NASA (grant no. 80NSSC19K1346) awarded under the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) program. ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (published version)