Long-range transport of coarse mineral dust: an evaluation of the Met Office Unified Model against aircraft observations

Ratcliffe, Natalie G.; Ryder, Claire L.; Bellouin, Nicolas; Woodward, Stephanie; Jones, Anthony; Johnson, Ben; Wieland, Lisa-Maria; Dollner, Maximilian; Gasteiger, Josef; Weinzierl, Bernadett

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-12161-2024

Articles | Volume 24, issue 21

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-12161-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-12161-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 24, issue 21

Research article

|

30 Oct 2024

Research article |

| 30 Oct 2024

Long-range transport of coarse mineral dust: an evaluation of the Met Office Unified Model against aircraft observations

Natalie G. Ratcliffe, Claire L. Ryder, Nicolas Bellouin, Stephanie Woodward, Anthony Jones, Ben Johnson, Lisa-Maria Wieland, Maximilian Dollner, Josef Gasteiger, and Bernadett Weinzierl

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-24-12161-2024-supplement

Data sets

FAAM B606 FENNEC, LADUNEX and EUFAR flight: Airborne atmospheric measurements from core and noncore instrument suites on board the BAE-146 aircraft Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements et al. https://dx.doi.org/10.5285/1f4555d2589841a8a4bbbf1fe42f54c8

UK ICE-D: atmospheric measurements dataset collection Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements and Alan Blyth http://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/d7e02c75191a4515a28a208c8a069e70/

Mean modelled dust mass concentration vertical profile (Junes 2010-2014) at Sahara, Canaries, Cape Verde and Caribbean (HadGEM3A-GA7.1) Natalie G. Ratcliffe et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10722717

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Short summary

Large mineral dust particles are more abundant in the atmosphere than expected and have different impacts on the environment than small particles, which are better represented in climate models. We use aircraft measurements to assess a climate model representation of large-dust transport. We find that the model underestimates the amount of large dust at all stages of transport and that fast removal of the large particles increases this underestimation with distance from the Sahara.