The DOI matches its Crossref record; 53 of the 53 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
A scaling theory for the size distribution of emitted dust aerosols suggests climate models underestimate the size of the global dust cycle
Open accessAbstract
Mineral dust aerosols impact Earth’s radiation budget through interactions with clouds, ecosystems, and radiation, which constitutes a substantial uncertainty in understanding past and predicting future climate changes. One of the causes of this large uncertainty is that the size distribution of emitted dust aerosols is poorly understood. The present study shows that regional and global circulation models (GCMs) overestimate the emitted fraction of clay aerosols (< 2 μm diameter) by a factor of ∼2–8 relative to measurements. This discrepancy is resolved by deriving a simple theoretical expression of the emitted dust size distribution that is in excellent agreement with measurements. This expression is based on the physics of the scale-invariant fragmentation of brittle materials, which is shown to be applicable to dust emission. Because clay aerosols produce a strong radiative cooling, the overestimation of the clay fraction causes GCMs to also overestimate the radiative cooling of a given quantity of emitted dust. On local and regional scales, this affects the magnitude and possibly the sign of the dust radiative forcing, with implications for numerical weather forecasting and regional climate predictions in dusty regions. On a global scale, the dust cycle in most GCMs is tuned to match radiative measurements, such that the overestimation of the radiative cooling of a given quantity of emitted dust has likely caused GCMs to underestimate the global dust emission rate. This implies that the deposition flux of dust and its fertilizing effects on ecosystems may be substantially larger than thought.
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Cited by
The physics of wind-blown sand and dust
Kok, J. F., Parteli, E. J. R., Michaels, T. I., & Karam, D. B. (2012) · Reports on Progress in Physics · doi:10.1088/0034-4885/75/10/106901 · Cited by 1,608
Self-citationRegCM4: model description and preliminary tests over multiple CORDEX domains
Giorgi, F., Coppola, E., Solmon, F., Mariotti, L., Sylla, M., Bi, X., Elguindi, N., Diro, G., Nair, V, Giuliani, G., et al. (2012) · Climate Research · doi:10.3354/cr01018 · Cited by 1,456
Knippertz, P., & Todd, M. C. (2012) · Reviews of Geophysics · doi:10.1029/2011rg000362 · Cited by 406
Substantial contribution of northern high‐latitude sources to mineral dust in the Arctic
Groot Zwaaftink, C. D., Grythe, H., Skov, H., & Stohl, A. (2016) · Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres · doi:10.1002/2016jd025482 · Cited by 205
Aerosol Deposition Impacts on Land and Ocean Carbon Cycles
Mahowald, N. M., Scanza, R., Brahney, J., Goodale, C. L., Hess, P. G., Moore, J. K., & Neff, J. (2017) · Current Climate Change Reports · doi:10.1007/s40641-017-0056-z · Cited by 181
Metadata
- Authors
- Kok, J. F.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2010-12-28
- Volume
- 108
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 1016-1021
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- OpenAlex
- W1974342476
- Cited by
- 607
- References
- 53
- FWCI
- 12.29
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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- Kok, J. F. (2011). A scaling theory for the size distribution of emitted dust aerosols suggests climate models underestimate the size of the global dust cycle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1014798108
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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