Abstract
All year long, massive airborne plumes of desert dust from the Sahara and surrounding regions are exported to the North Atlantic Ocean1 and the Mediterranean Sea2. The mass of African dust transported in the atmosphere is large—about one billion tonnes per year (ref. 3)—and it has been suggested that the wind-blown dusts have a substantial influence on the regional radiative budget4,5,6. Here we use daily satellite observations of airborne dusts7 to obtain an 11-year regional-scale analysis of dust transport out of Africa. The substantial seasonal variability over the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea can be explained by the synoptic meteorology. Interannual variations in dust transport are similar over both regions, and are well correlated with the climatic variability defined by the North Atlantic Oscillation8. This large-scale climatic control on the dust export is effected through changes in precipitation and atmospheric circulation over the regions of dust mobilization and transport. Such natural variability is so large that it is difficult to resolve any anthropogenic influences on atmospheric dust loads, such as those due to desertification or land-use changes. It seems likely that the North Atlantic Oscillation will also affect the distribution—and radiative influence—of other aerosols.
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Acknowledgements
We thank J. W. Hurrell and J. M. Prospero for providing us with their data, and for their comments; Y. Balkanski for facilitating the access to the AVISO archive; V. Masson, J. Orr and B. Ziv for discussions about climatic variability; and W. Guelle and X. Schneider for their utility computer codes. This work was supported by the CEA and the CNRS.
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Moulin, C., Lambert, C., Dulac, F. et al. Control of atmospheric export of dust from North Africa by the North Atlantic Oscillation. Nature 387, 691–694 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/42679
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/42679
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