GC22D-07
Advances in Mineral Dust Source Composition Measurement with Imaging Spectroscopy at the Salton Sea, CA

Tuesday, 15 December 2015: 11:50
3014 (Moscone West)
Robert O Green1, Vincent J Realmuto1, David Ray Thompson2, Natalie M Mahowald3, Carlos Pérez García-Pando4, Ron L Miller5, Roger Nelson Clark6, Gregg A Swayze7 and Greg S Okin8, (1)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (2)Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (3)Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, United States, (4)Columbia University of New York, Palisades, NY, United States, (5)NASA/GISS, New York, NY, United States, (6)Planetary Science Institute Tucson, Tucson, AZ, United States, (7)U.S. Geological Survey, Denver, CO, United States, (8)University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Abstract:
Mineral dust emitted from the Earth’s surface is a principal contributor to direct radiative forcing over the arid regions, where shifts in climate have a significant impact on agriculture, precipitation, and desert encroachment around the globe. Dust particles contribute to both positive and negative forcing, depending on the composition of the particles. Particle composition is a function of the surface mineralogy of dust source regions, but poor knowledge of surface mineralogy on regional to global scales limits the skill of Earth System models to predict shifts in regional climate around the globe. Earth System models include the source, emission, transport and deposition phases of the dust cycle.

In addition to direct radiative forcing contributions, mineral dust impacts include indirect radiative forcing, modification of the albedo and melting rates of snow and ice, kinetics of tropospheric photochemistry, formation and deposition of acidic aerosols, supply of nutrients to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and impact on human health and safety.

We demonstrate the ability to map mineral dust source composition in the Salton Sea dust source region with imaging spectroscopy measurements acquired as part of the NASA HyspIRI preparatory airborne campaign. These new spectroscopically derived compositional measurements provide a six orders of magnitude improvement over current atlases for this dust source region and provide a pathfinder example for a remote measurement approach to address this critical dust composition gap for global Earth System models.

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