Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Mineral dust aerosols affect Earth’s energy balance in multiple ways, including interactions with solar radiation, but this effect remains poorly quantified. A central limitation has been the lack of reliable global information on dust mineral composition, particularly light-absorbing iron oxides. An imaging spectrometer, placed aboard the International Space Station by the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation mission, provides high-resolution, near-global retrievals of surface mineralogy. Here we incorporate these retrievals into four Earth system models to constrain the dust shortwave direct radiative effect. Analysis shows that the retrievals reduce the radiative effect uncertainty by more than a factor of six in both present-day (2007–2011) and late twenty-first-century (2090–2094) climates. This improvement is enabled by tighter constraints on iron oxide content, which reduce its uncertainty contribution from 0.62 W m−2 to 0.10 W m−2. Greatest improvement occurs over the Sahara, where high dust abundance and surface reflectance amplify the influence of iron oxides. Orbital spectroscopy thus shifts the primary uncertainty from mineral composition to processes controlling the spatial distribution of dust. These findings mark a transition towards confident aerosol composition modelling and provide an improved basis for assessing how dust alters Earth’s energy balance today and in a warming future. Global soil mineral data from orbital spectroscopy reduce uncertainty in dust’s solar radiative impact and improve estimates of Earth’s energy imbalance, according to analyses integrating high-resolution soil composition into Earth system models.
Source: Nature Geoscience
Institutions: Cornell University, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Planetary Science Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, California Institute of Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
SDG: Climate action
Open Access status: green
Funders: National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, California Institute of Technology, European Commission, AXA Research Fund, Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Science Mission Directorate, European Regional Development Fund, Agencia Estatal de Investigación
Awards: G1045693472, G1175115578, Constrained aerosol forcing for improved climate projections, G1622782223, G1813891348, G203129345, G2048821276, G2072863431, G210041235, G2262748287, G2273245655, G2601397997, INTERACTIONS BETWEEN LAND USE, FIRES AND DUST AS DRIVERS OF GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE, G2676722403, G300979063, G34346518, G3480869486, Cloud-aERosol inTeractions & their impActs IN The earth sYstem, G3648211085, G3681454997, G4042783231, G410571670, G425668148, G451917667, G4526231891, G5080475149, G5195188938, G5539308778, G5913267992, G5967599077, G7084143925, G7241645997, G830101876, G8430294048, G8528175629, G869884560, G8918339633, G929308097
OpenAlex ID: W7162990952