Department of Earth System Science

Mineral aerosols are important atmospheric constituents owing to their interactions with climate and biogeochemistry. The interannual variability in atmospheric mineral aerosols is evaluated using a model simulation of 1979–2000 and mineral aerosol observations. Overall, the variability in monthly means between different years is not as large as the variability within a month for column amount, surface concentration, and deposition fluxes. The magnitude of the variability predicted in the model varies spatially and appears similar to that seen in the available observations, although the model is not always able to simulate observed high- and low-dust years. The area over which the interannual variability in the observing station data should be representative is estimated in the model simulation and is shown to be regional in extent. However, correlations between modeled surface concentrations at the stations and modeled deposition in the surrounding region is often low, suggesting that the observations of the variability of surface concentrations are difficult to extrapolate to variability in regional deposition fluxes. The correlations between modeled monthly mean optical depth and modeled deposition or mobilization are low to moderate (0.2–0.6) over much of the globe, indicating the difficulty of estimating mobilization or deposition fluxes from satellite retrievals of optical depth. In both the model and observations there are relationships between climate indices (e.g., North Atlantic Oscillation, El Niño, and Pacific Decadal Oscillation) and dust, although a 22-year simulation is not long enough to well characterize this relationship. In this model, simulation of 1979–2000, dust concentration variability appears to be dominated by transport variability and/or transport and source covariance rather than source strength variability.