Technical Note: Minerals in dust productive soils – impacts and global distribution

Abstract

Dust storms and associated mineral aerosol transport are mainly driven by meso and synoptic scale atmospheric processes. It is therefore essential that the dust aerosol process and background atmospheric conditions that drive the dust emission and atmospheric transport be represented with sufficiently well resolved spatial and temporal features. Effects of airborne dust interactions with the environment are determent by the mineral composition of dust particles. Fractions of various minerals in the aerosol are determined by the mineral composition of arid soils, therefore high-resolution specification of mineral and physical properties of dust sources is needed as well. Most current dust atmospheric models simulate/predict the evolution of dust concentration but in most cases they do not consider fractions of minerals in dust. Accumulated knowledge on impacts of mineral composition in dust on weather and climate processes emphasizes the importance of considering minerals in modelling systems. Following such needs, in this study we developed a global dataset on mineral composition of potentially dust productive soils. In our study (a) we mapped mineral data into a high-resolution 30-s grid, (b) we included mineral carrying soil types in dust productive regions that were not considered in previous studies, and (c) included phosphorus having in mind their importance for terrestrial and marine nutrition processes.