Advances in Measurements and Modeling of the Earth’s Mineral Dust Source Regions

Dear Colleagues,

Mineral dust emitted into the atmosphere by Aeolian processes is a major component of atmospheric aerosols. The net contribution of mineral dust to atmospheric warming or cooling depends on the mineralogy of dust particles, and initialization of Earth System Models (ESM) with the surface composition of dust source regions is required to forecast the state of the Earth’s dust cycle and impacts of dust on the Earth system, e.g. dust interaction with clouds and radiation, and dust effects on climate and air quality during the long range transport. ESM derive the mineralogy of airborne dust from the composition and spatial distribution of the soils exposed in dust source regions, and, consequently, ESM-based forecasts are sensitive to the soil maps used to initialize the models.

NASA recently announced a new Earth observing mission The Earth surface Mineral dust source InvesTigation (EMIT) to conduct comprehensive spectroscopic surveys of the surface mineralogy of arid dust source regions on the ~100m-scale resolution. EMIT proposed to provide a comprehensive inventory of key surface minerals available for dust emission and demonstrate the improvements in forecasting skill of ESM initialized with high-resolution mineralogical datasets.

This special issue aims in bring together expertise in the observation and modeling of the mineral dust cycle with a focus on observational and modeling studies of mineral dust source regions. Papers are invited of field and modeling studies of mineral dust source regions, models for the generation, emission, and radiative properties of mineral dust, and analyses of airborne and space-borne measurements of dust minerology and optics.

Prof. Dr. Hesham El-Askary
Dr. Slobodan Nickovic
Dr. Michael J. Garay
Dr. Olga Kalashnikova
Guest Editors

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