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Atmospheric chemistry

Warming or cooling dust?

Nature Geoscience volume 10, pages 246–248 (2017)Cite this article

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Mineral dust particles interact with solar and terrestrial radiation. Statistical analyses of observational data and global simulations reveal that atmospheric dust is coarser than previously thought, and could cause warming of the atmosphere.

Atmospheric aerosols play an important role in Earth's radiative balance. Mineral dust, which is the most abundant aerosol by mass, is lofted into the atmosphere when strong surface winds pass over bare and dry soil, especially in low-lying areas of arid or semi-arid landscapes1. Dust can both absorb and reflect radiation depending, in part, on its size. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Kok and colleagues2 use observational data and simulations of dust properties to show that dust observed in the atmosphere is substantially coarser than that represented in models. Accounting for more coarse and less fine dust in global simulations results in less cooling than previously reported, and possibly a warming of the atmosphere.

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Figure 1: Dust transported off West Africa in 2010.

NASA

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Paul Ginoux is at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton University Forrestal Campus, 201 Forrestal Road, Princeton, New Jersey 08540-6649, USA,

    Paul Ginoux

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  1. Paul Ginoux
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Correspondence to Paul Ginoux.

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Ginoux, P. Warming or cooling dust?. Nature Geosci 10, 246–248 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2923

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