Abstract
Abstract. The mineralogy of airborne dust affects the impact of dust particles on direct and indirect radiative forcing, on atmospheric chemistry and on biogeochemical cycling. It is determined partly by the mineralogy of the dust-source regions and partly by size-dependent fractionation during erosion and transport. Here we present a data set that characterizes the clay and silt-sized fractions of global soil units in terms of the abundance of 12 minerals that are important for dust–climate interactions: quartz, feldspars, illite, smectite, kaolinite, chlorite, vermiculite, mica, calcite, gypsum, hematite and goethite. The basic mineralogical information is derived from the literature, and is then expanded following explicit rules, in order to characterize as many soil units as possible. We present three alternative realizations of the mineralogical maps, taking the uncertainties in the mineralogical data into account. We examine the implications of the new database for calculations of the single scattering albedo of airborne dust and thus for dust radiative forcing.
Highlights
Dust particles, emitted in large quantities by aeolian erosion of arid and semi-arid soils, play an important role on Earth’s climate system
Sokolik and Toon (1996), were the first to suggest incorporating the mineralogical composition of dust particles into models and subsequent work has shown the importance of accounting for mineralogy in estimating the direct radiative effect (Claquin et al, 1999; Sokolik and Toon, 1999; Balkanski et al, 2007; Hansell et al, 2008)
Mineralogy affects the hygroscopic properties of atmospheric particles and the indirect radiative forcing by dust
Summary
Dust particles, emitted in large quantities by aeolian erosion of arid and semi-arid soils, play an important role on Earth’s climate system. During atmospheric transport, they affect Earth’s radiative budget directly by absorbing or scattering the solar or infrared radiation (Sokolik and Toon, 1996) or indirectly by acting as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) or ice nuclei (IN) (Rosenfeld et al, 2001; DeMott et al, 2003; Creamean et al, 2013). The mineralogy of airborne dust is linked to the mineralogy of the erodible fraction of the soil source, modified by size fractionation during erosion, suspension and transport. We examine some of the consequences of using this database to specify the properties of airborne dust
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