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Dust and Pollution: Coupling Aerosol Nutrients to Marine and Land Biogeochemistry

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Abstract

Aerosols deliver essential nutrients to marine and land ecosystems. Dust particles deposited to the remote ocean surface are a major source of the essential micronutrients iron (Fe), which stimulate phytoplankton growth and nitrogen fixation in the high-nutrient low-chlorophyll (HNLC) sea waters. Atmospheric pollution such as sulfuric acids and organic ligands plays an important role in this pathway by transforming insoluble dust minerals into soluble (bioavailable) Fe nutrients during the transport of dust to the remote ocean. In addition to Fe, dust deposition also replenishes nutrient losses such as phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) from soil and affects the health of terrestrial ecosystems. However, these aerosol biogeochemical effects are either de-coupled between atmosphere and ocean or land biogeochemistry models in the Earth system simulations like E3SMv1 and v2 did; or the ESM-simulated soluble Fe deposition fluxes may be an order of magnitude smaller than what the more detailed atmospheric Fe processing models suggest. In this presentation, we will show the progress toward coupling aerosol nutrient cycles to ocean and land biogeochemistry in E3SM. For the first time, dust aerosol and soluble Fe deposition predicted by the E3SM atmospheric model (EAM) are used as inputs to drive the ocean and sea ice biogeochemistry online. The updated dust scheme in EAMv3 accounts for the time-dependent soil erodibility calculated from the model-predicted soil moisture and fractional areas of bare ground, enabling a close coupling of dust generation with land surface changes. The improved EAMv3 thus captures the spatial and seasonal variations of dust and dust Fe surface concentrations in the observations better than v2. The coupling with the Fe solubility maps generated from a detailed Fe dissolution model further improves the predictions of soluble Fe over the ocean surface. Compared to the prescribed soluble Fe climatology used in v2, E3SMv3 predicts enhanced Fe supply to the Arctic and sub-Arctic HNLC oceans while underestimates in the tropic Pacific and southern hemisphere, likely due to the missing pyrogenic Fe sources from fires. Moreover, the coupled E3SMv3 model predicts a strong temporal variability in dust deposition to the ocean over the last three decades (1985-2014). These long-term trends in dust sources, attributed to climate change and land-use land-cover changes, further drive the temporal changes of the atmospheric Fe supply to the ocean basins that were neglected previously. The enhanced capability of coupling aerosol nutrients to biogeochemical cycles in E3SM will advance quantification of changes in marine and land ecosystems in response to the continuing human perturbation to the Earth System.

Category
Biogeochemistry (Processes and Feedbacks)
High Latitude
Model Uncertainties, Model Biases, and Fit-for-Purpose
Funding Program Area(s)
Additional Resources:
NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center)