The ice-nucleating activity of African mineral dust in the Caribbean boundary layer

Abstract

African mineral dust is transported many thousands of kilometres from its source regions, and, because of its ability to nucleate ice, it plays a major role in cloud glaciation around the globe. The ice-nucleating activity of desert dust is influenced by its mineralogy, which varies substantially between source regions and across particle sizes. However, in models it is often assumed that the activity (expressed as active sites per unit surface area as a function of temperature) of atmospheric mineral dust is the same everywhere on the globe. Here, we find that the ice-nucleating activity of African desert dust sampled in the summertime marine boundary layer of Barbados (July and August 2017) is substantially lower than parameterizations based on soil from specific locations in the Sahara or dust sedimented from dust storms. We conclude that the activity of dust in Barbados' boundary layer is primarily defined by the low K-feldspar content of the dust, which is around 1%. We propose that the dust we sampled in the Caribbean was from a region in western Africa (in and around the Sahel in Mauritania and Mali), which has a much lower feldspar content than other African sources across the Sahara and Sahel.