Development of a Dust-Iron Modeling System and a Benchmarking Regional Dust-Iron Budget Study

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Yaping Shao
• Subject Area: Atmospheric Science
• Term: from 2013 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 237553958

Large quantities of dust are deposited to the ocean each year and the associated iron supply plays an essential role in the surface-ocean biomass production which determines the ocean carbon uptake from the atmosphere. However, our quantitative estimates of dust-iron deposition to ocean are plagued with uncertainties. We very much rely on dust models to generate the dust-iron deposition patterns for studying the ocean biome response to climate change and to estimate the ocean carbon sink in an atmosphere with elevated CO2 concentration. Existing dust models cannot predict dust particles-size distributions which are necessary for determining dust-iron transport and deposition. In this project, we plan to tackle the most critical issues in studying the dust-iron-carbon relations by developing a new regional dust-iron modeling system with the capacity of determining size-resolved dust-iron emissions and depositions for both dust-storm events and sporadic weak dust events. The approach to dust parameterization will be completely new. The modeling system will be applied to the Lake Eyre Basin of Australia, which is the largest Aeolian dust-iron source in the southern Hemisphere and is rich in dust-iron observations and land-surface characterizations. If successful, this project will provide, for the first time, a detailed regional iron budget for benchmarking the simulations of global dust-iron patterns and ocean biome responses to iron supply.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants