Mineral Aerosol Variability in the Anthropocene

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Desert dust aerosols impact the climate and biogeochemistry. This project seeks to improve our understanding of the spatial and temporal variability of desert dust and desert response to climate and human perturbation. It will address the following two questions i) What is the spatial and temporally varying distribution of desert dust aerosols, with uncertainty estimates? ii) How have desert dust aerosols changed over the past 130 years and how will they change in the future? The investigator will: i) improve the simulation of desert dust in the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Community Climate System Model (CCSM), including the capability of modeling mineralogy, ii) compile available observations of mineral aerosol, including in situ elemental aerosol data, visibility data and remote sensing data over desert dust regions, iii) combine modeling study with observations using statistical approaches to provide an estimate of the range of uncertainty in sources, distributions and deposition that is consistent with available observations for the current climate, iv) provide model estimates for the locations and type of data where more observations would be most valuable, and v) provide improved model estimates of preindustrial to current and future mineral aerosols, as well as the resulting radiative forcing and climate response (with uncertainties).The broader impacts of this project include i) improvements in the aerosol formulation in the CCSM, a community model; ii) improvements in our understanding of desert dust aerosols; iii) the training of graduate and undergraduate students, iv) wide dissemination of results and findings in conferences, workshops and refereed literature.