Mineral aerosols, also referred to as desert dust or soil particles, represent an important radiative forcing agent on the climate system, but the anthropogenic contribution to total dust loading is not well known. Results of several studies attempting to constrain the landuse portion of mineral ... Show moreMineral aerosols, also referred to as desert dust or soil particles, represent an important radiative forcing agent on the climate system, but the anthropogenic contribution to total dust loading is not well known. Results of several studies attempting to constrain the landuse portion of mineral aerosols suggest a range of 10% to 50% (Tegen and Fung, 1995; Prospero et al., 2002; Mahowald et al., 2002; Mahowald and Luo, 2003; Luo et al., 2003; Tegen et al., 2004). The main purpose of our study is to reduce that uncertainty to improve our understanding of mineral aerosols. Correlation coefficients between the observed data and the model data in the12 scenarios examined were calculated to identify which scenario best correlates with the observations of dust storm frequency compiled at 2249 stations during the years 1950-2000 from the International Stations Meteorological Climate Summary (ISMCS). The analyses were performed globally and regionally. Globally, the 10% landuse - 90% natural scenario, using the concentration criterion, represents the best match to the observations, with a correlation coefficient of 0.73. However, no statistically significant difference between this scenario and the 0% - 40% landuse scenario was identified. Regionally, there are no statistically significant higher correlations for any given scenario as opposed to the other scenarios, except for Africa where 50% was statistically significantly different. As a general conclusion, we found that the mobilization scenarios show less correlation with the observed data than the concentration scenarios. Show less
