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Smaller desert dust cooling effect estimated from analysis of dust size and abundance

Nature Geoscience volume 10, pages 274–278 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Desert dust aerosols affect Earth’s global energy balance through direct interactions with radiation, and through indirect interactions with clouds and ecosystems. But the magnitudes of these effects are so uncertain that it remains unclear whether atmospheric dust has a net warming or cooling effect on global climate. Consequently, it is still uncertain whether large changes in atmospheric dust loading over the past century have slowed or accelerated anthropogenic climate change, or what the effects of potential future changes in dust loading will be. Here we present an analysis of the size and abundance of dust aerosols to constrain the direct radiative effect of dust. Using observational data on dust abundance, in situ measurements of dust optical properties and size distribution, and climate and atmospheric chemical transport model simulations of dust lifetime, we find that the dust found in the atmosphere is substantially coarser than represented in current global climate models. As coarse dust warms the climate, the global dust direct radiative effect is likely to be less cooling than the ∼−0.4 W m−2 estimated by models in a current global aerosol model ensemble. Instead, we constrain the dust direct radiative effect to a range between −0.48 and +0.20 W m−2, which includes the possibility that dust causes a net warming of the planet.

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Figure 1: New constraints on dust properties and prevalence.
Figure 2: Size-resolved global loading of desert dust aerosols.
Figure 3: Global emission rate and atmospheric loading of desert dust aerosols.
Figure 4: Constraints on the global direct radiative effect (DRE) of PM20 dust.

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Acknowledgements

We thank V. Bouchard, B. Yi, K.-N. Liou, P. Yang, A. Tripati, D. Neelin, J. Bortnik, R. Martin, K. Ledger, A. Evan, S. Shaked and R. Kahn for helpful comments and discussions, and thank P. Rosenberg for providing the data from ref. 37. We acknowledge support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant 1552519 (J.F.K.), NASA grants NN14AP38G (D.A.R. and C.L.H.) and NNG14HH42I (R.L.M.), and from the US Department of Energy as part of the Regional & Global Climate Modeling program (C.Z.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA

    Jasper F. Kok

  2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

    David A. Ridley & Colette L. Heald

  3. Department of Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA

    Qing Zhou

  4. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, New York 10025, USA

    Ron L. Miller

  5. School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China

    Chun Zhao

  6. Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

    Colette L. Heald

  7. Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, New York 08544, USA

    Daniel S. Ward

  8. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Gif-sur-Yvette F-91191, France

    Samuel Albani

  9. School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK

    Karsten Haustein

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Contributions

J.F.K. conceived the project, designed the study, performed the analysis, and wrote the paper. D.A.R., C.Z., C.L.H., R.L.M., D.S.W., S.A. and K.H. contributed global model simulations. Q.Z. assisted with designing the statistical model to constrain dust properties from different data sets. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jasper F. Kok.

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Kok, J., Ridley, D., Zhou, Q. et al. Smaller desert dust cooling effect estimated from analysis of dust size and abundance. Nature Geosci 10, 274–278 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2912

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