Dust aerosol important for snowball earth deglaciation

Abstract

Most previous global climate model simulations could only produce the termination of Snowball Earth episodes at CO2 partial pressures of several tenths of a bar, which is roughly an order of magnitude higher than recent estimates of CO2 levels during and shortly after Snowball events. These simulations have neglected the impact of dust aerosols on radiative transfer, which is an assumption of potentially grave importance. In this paper it is argued, using the Dust Entrainment and Deposition (DEAD) box model driven by GCM results, that atmospheric dust aerosol concentrations may have been one to two orders of magnitude higher during a Snowball Earth event than today. It is furthermore asserted on the basis of calculations using NCAR's Single Column Atmospheric Model (SCAM)-a radiative-convective model with sophisticated aerosol, cloud, and radiative parameterizations-that when the surface albedo is high, such increases in dust aerosol loading can produce several times more surface warming than an increase in the partial pressure of CO2 from 10-4 to 10-1 bar. Therefore the conclusion is reached that including dust aerosols in simulations may reconcile the CO2 levels required for Snowball termination in climate models with observations. © 2010 American Meteorological Society.