Summary
As part of the
Dust Doctoral Network (Dust-DN), we continue our webinar series aimed at bringing leading experts in atmospheric dust research to our community, strengthening scientific exchange, advanced training, and collaboration across dust-related research fields.
It is our great pleasure to announce that the webinar with Professor Jasper Kok (UCLA) has now been scheduled. The seminar, titled "The overlooked radiative forcing of desert dust" on Tuesday, 17 March, 7:00 to 8:00 AM PST (15:00–16:00 CET).
About the Speaker:
Prof. Jasper Kok is a Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA. His research focuses on physical processes relevant to climate and planetary sciences, with fundamental contributions to the understanding of desert dust emission and its impacts on the climate system. He is the author of over 60 peer-reviewed publications and a recipient of several prestigious awards, including Henry Houghton Early Career Award from American Meteorological Society.
Summary:
"Projections of future climate changes are highly sensitive to the fraction of the historical greenhouse warming that has been offset by the coincident increase in cooling from aerosols. It is surprising then that the radiative forcing due to changes in one of the major aerosol species, desert dust, is normally neglected in climate change assessments and projections of future climate changes.
Here we show that this is problematic: we reconstruct historical changes in desert dust using dozens of sedimentary records of dust deposition, finding that global dust mass loading has increased by 55 ± 30% (90% confidence interval) since pre-industrial times. We combine this result with estimated radiative effects for the various mechanisms through which dust impacts climate, including a new data-driven constraint on the poorly quantified longwave direct radiative effect, finding that this historical increase in dust produced a global mean effective radiative forcing of -0.07 ± 0.18 Wm-2. As such, dust might have slightly counteracted greenhouse warming, biasing climate change projections and assessments of climate sensitivity.
To enable climate models and climate assessments to account for dust radiative forcing we provide a dust emission inventory that captures the historical dust increase."
