Letter abstract
Nature Geoscience 2, 557 - 560 (2009)
Published online: 20 July 2009 | doi:10.1038/ngeo583
Asian dust transported one full circuit around the globe
Itsushi Uno1, Kenta Eguchi2, Keiya Yumimoto1, Toshihiko Takemura1, Atsushi Shimizu3, Mitsuo Uematsu4, Zhaoyan Liu5, Zifa Wang6, Yukari Hara3 & Nobuo Sugimoto3
Mineral dust is usually transported long distances in the lower troposphere. There are examples of Asian dust being transported across the Pacific Ocean1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and traces of Asian dust have also been found in ice and snow cores in Greenland8 and the French Alps9. Here, we use measurements from the Cloud–Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization10, an air parcel trajectory model and a three-dimensional aerosol transport model to map the transport of dust clouds generated during a storm in China's Taklimakan Desert during May 2007. We show that the dust-veiled clouds were lofted to the upper troposphere around 8–10 km above the Earth's surface and transported more than one full circuit around the globe in about 13 days. When the dust reached the northwestern Pacific Ocean for the second time, the subsidence of a large-scale high-pressure system caused it to descend into the lower troposphere; some of the dust was then deposited over the ocean. Our analysis also indicates that the dust particles may have acted as ice nuclei in these high-altitude clouds, leading to the formation of cirrus clouds. We suggest that Asian dust can influence the global radiation budget by stimulating cirrus cloud formation and marine ecosystems by supplying nutrients to the open ocean.
- Research Institute for Applied Mechanics, Kyushu University, Kasuga, Fukuoka 816-8580, Japan
- Department of Earth System Science and Tech., Kyushu University, Kasuga, Fukuoka 816-8580, Japan
- National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8506, Japan
- Ocean Research Institute, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 164-8639, Japan
- National Institute of Aerospace, Hampton, Virginia 23666, USA
- LAPC/NZC, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100029, China
Correspondence to: Itsushi Uno1 e-mail: uno@riam.kyushu-u.ac.jp
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