The Development of a Dust Mineralogy Map from Satellite Retrievals and Implementation in WRF-Chem

Abstract

Mineral dust particles are key ingredients of the atmosphere. They interact in atmospheric physics and chemistry and have important implications for human health. Therefore, it is important to examine the properties of these aerosols, including their ambient concentrations, size distributions, shape and mineral composition. In this work, we use satellite remote sensing from Sentinel 2A and EMIT missions to derive the mineralogical composition of surface areas, and we describe the development of a new module to represent the atmospheric life cycle of individual dust minerals in WRF-Chem. In the first step, the GMINER30 mineralogical database is implemented in WRF-Chem to describe the emission, transport, dry and wet deposition of different mineral types.

Keywords

• desert dust
• mineralogy
• WRF-Chem