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Sunday, December 21, 2014

Our poster presentation on predicting the mineral composition of dust aerosols at the 2014 fall meeting of the AGU

I just have come back from this year's fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. The meeting was very interesting and productive (and exhausting) for me. The amount of exciting science from the whole range of geosciences, presented by many enthusiastic researchers at the AGU, is always overwhelming. I wish I would have been able to suck in more from all the information provided in the oral and poster sessions.

I, together with my collaborators Carlos Pérez García-Pando and Ron Miller, had following poster presentation on "Predicting the Mineral Composition of Dust Aerosols: Evaluation and Implications" in the session "Aerosol Comparisons between Observations and Models".

 

The abstract of the poster states:

"Soil dust aerosols in Earth system models are typically assumed to have globally uniform properties. However, important climate processes related to dust depend on the aerosol mineral and chemical composition, which varies regionally. Such processes include aerosol radiative forcing, transport of bioavailable iron that catalyzes marine photosynthesis, heterogeneous chemistry, ice nucleation, and cloud condensation.
We have implemented a new version of the soil dust aerosol scheme in the NASA GISS Earth System ModelE that takes into account the mineral composition of the dust particles. Dust aerosols are represented as an external mixture of minerals such as illite, kaolinite, smectite, carbonates, quartz, feldspar and gypsum, as well as iron oxides and accretions of iron oxides with each of these minerals.
We present a new publically available compilation of measurements of mineral fractions derived from ca. 50 references from the literature. This compilation is used to evaluate our new model of mineral and elemental composition within ModelE. We discuss the challenges of comparing simulated mineral fractions to measurements, which often come from field campaigns and ship cruises of limited duration. Despite uncertainties of the measurements, we show the importance of estimating the undisturbed size distribution of the parent soil prior to wet sieving, along with the modification of this size distribution during emission. 
In particular, our new model reproduces measurements showing greater amount of aerosols at silt sizes (whose diameters exceed 2 μm) including significant amounts of clay mineral aerosols (like illite) at silt sizes. Our model also reduces the systematic overestimation of quartz, while allowing iron to be transported farther from its source as impurities than in its pure, crystalline form."

The two papers where the details of the results from three years of research can be found have just been submitted to Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss. Let's see how they are going to do in the review process.

Update 03/07/2015: Our two discussion papers have been published at Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions now and can be found here:

http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/15/3493/2015/acpd-15-3493-2015.html
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/15/3577/2015/acpd-15-3577-2015.html

6 comments:

  1. I really appreciate your professional approach. These are pieces of very useful information that will be of great use for me in future.

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  2. Great article, Thanks for your great information, the content is quiet interesting. I will be waiting for your next post.

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  3. Right, so if you say Hitler once made a point - like a needle in a haystack, suddenly you get labelled as a jew-hater by Mr Perlwitz. Fragmented thinking indeed!

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  4. KCCO, so give me your explanation, please. Adolf Hitler writes in Mein Kampf how "The Jew" had created the "The Big Lie" and used it to control the world. Someone cites this passage from the book and states Hitler had correctly described how it was. What follows about this person regarding his/her thinking about Jewish people?

    However, this wasn't even my argument in the posting. What I wrote was a bit more nuanced. For instance, I did not conclude that Tim Ball was a "Jew-hater". I wrote something else. I was careful to not state something just based on an assumption without textual evidence.

    Thus, is it really a case of fragmented thinking on my side? Or is it rather a case where you don't understand the content of the text you have read?

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  5. A fair point maybe. But Jan, it is still based on semantics and an intellectual somersault. (ie. “structural anti-semitism” - your words.) The context to what he and you said is very important - yes:

    I don't believe that was the argument he was running with at all. There’s another aspect: Science is one thing that Big Lies cannot defeat. But lies can (and do) prey on contentious areas in science.

    Case in point, bear with me on this example, please: The most corrupt science today is modern economics - when viewed vs 1800s or Austrian school economics. (ie. Keynes vs Hayek) Especially in terms of *unprecedented* total credit market debt (& global credit derivatives) levels being "okay". Read any article on zerohedge.com or kingworldnews and you’ll realise the mainstream narrative is grossly misleading.


    This is a big threat to our personal finances and the future of free western nations - we have the greatest threat to US national security (as Pentagon analyst Jim Rickards puts it) in an unstable int'l monetary / dollar system.

    So what’s my point here? A corrupted science has (and will) change the world. The next financial crisis is the key to viewing our future globally. In crisis, the IMF has a clean bail-out balance sheet ready (whereas the Fed does not) along with a UN-supported one-world currency ready, ie. the SDR. (Rickards, 2014)

    The capital and bond markets to support this are underway (UN SDR bonds, initially for ‘development’). All large bond markets rely on a reliable revenue stream (ie. a tax or income).

    Similar to 1913, when this unconstitutional bankers’ debt scam began (Fed & IRS created together): Are we making the same mistake but on a global level? Are we creating the framework that might enable future global taxation via what AGW first created? (Remember, crises are transformative catalysts eg. 1907.) On the surface it seems far-fetched, but this is what the evidence suggests.

    Look into this for yourself, don’t take my word for it. And when you do, maybe even delete this comment.

    So the question is, are we (as scientists) players or pawns? Science should prevail
    over all other agendas.

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  6. Let me add this as well (if I may indulge a little) - a quote from german analyst Dimitri Speck (The Gold Cartel - 2013 p.192):


    "It is, therefore, one of the most important things in economics to understand credit claim-driven bubbles. Ever since credit claims have appeared on the scene in macro-economically relevant sizes, these problems have existed. Of all problems related to money and credit, the [current] bubble is the only one that has hitherto not been resolved. It is also the only one that is fundamentally not solvable. Both the threat of inflationary devaluation and the threat of a deflationary collapse are the shadows that accompany every economy in which credit claims exist."


    This should hopefully forestall further talk of setup / conspiracy, especially any rubbish talk involving the good Jewish people of this world!

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