Role of K-feldspar and quartz in global ice nucleation by mineral dust in mixed-phase clouds

Abstract

Ice-nucleating particles (INPs) enable ice formation, profoundly affecting the microphysical and radiative properties, lifetimes, and precipitation rates of clouds. Mineral dust emitted from arid regions, particularly potassium-containing feldspar (K-feldspar), has been shown to be a very effective INP through immersion freezing in mixed-phase clouds. However, despite the fact that quartz has a significantly lower ice nucleation activity, it is more abundant than K-feldspar in atmospheric desert dust and therefore may be a significant source of INPs. In this contribution, we test this hypothesis by investigating the global and regional importance of quartz as a contributor to INPs in the atmosphere relative to K-feldspar. We have extended a global 3-D chemistry transport model (TM4-ECPL) to predict INP concentrations from both K-feldspar and quartz mineral dust particles with state-of-the-art parameterizations using the ice-active surface-site approach for immersion freezing. Our results show that, although K-feldspar remains the most important contributor to INP concentrations globally, affecting mid-level mixed-phase clouds, the contribution of quartz can also be significant. Quartz dominates the lowest and the highest altitudes of dust-derived INPs, affecting mainly low-level and high-level mixed-phase clouds. The consideration of quartz INPs also improves the comparison between simulations and observations at low temperatures. Our simulated INP concentrations predict ∼ 51 % of the observations gathered from different campaigns within 1 order of magnitude and ∼ 69 % within 1.5 orders of magnitude, despite the omission of other potentially important INP aerosol precursors like marine bioaerosols. Our findings support the inclusion of quartz in addition to K-feldspar as an INP in climate models and highlight the need for further constraining their abundance in arid soil surfaces along with their abundance, size distribution, and mixing state in the emitted dust atmospheric particles.