Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 12
Mineral Dust and its Microphysical
Interactions with Clouds
Athanasios Nenes, Benjamin Murray, and Aikaterini Bougiatioti
Abstract
Our understanding of the interactions of aerosols and clouds has a strong
heritage in laboratory experiments, field measurements, and process modeling.
We present a review on the state of knowledge for mineral dust emitted from major
global dust source regions. Laboratory studies and field measurements have given
insights on processes and mechanisms taking place when mineral dust is released
into the atmosphere and reacts with the atmospheric constituents. Furthermore,
theoretical approaches and parameterizations have been established to interpret the
observations and quantitatively express the mechanisms by which dust can act as
cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and ice nuclei (IN). Finally, model simulations
have been used in order to study the effects of dust particles to different aerosol-
cloud-climate interactions. Dust can act as efficient CCN in clouds solely based on
their relatively large size combined with the hydrophilicity from the adsorption of
water vapor on their insoluble core. When mixed with even small fractions of hygro-
scopic material from emission or atmospheric processing, their hygroscopicity and
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