PAGES' Dust Impact on Climate and Environment working group (DICE) will hold a workshop titled "The Role of Dust in Climate Change: A biogeochemistry perspective" in Las Cruces, Chile, from 8-10 January 2018.
Logistics
The three-day workshop will be held at Coastal Marine Research Station of the Catholic University of Chile.
The workshop is limited to 30-40 participants. Early-career scientists are encouraged to apply and will receive financial support (see below).
Accommodation for all participants will be organized by the local committee.
Workshop aims
In this workshop, participants will aim to better constrain the impact of dust on continental and marine biogeochemistry cycles. Key participants from the dust modeling, dust reconstruction, and biogeochemistry communities will be invited.
Overview
Mineral dust aerosols are critically important components of climate and Earth system dynamics as they affect, radiative forcing, precipitation, atmospheric chemistry, and biogeochemistry, over significant portions of the planet. Emission patterns, transport, and impact of aerosols on global climate are variable under past and ongoing climate and environmental change. It is thus increasingly important to improve our understanding of the impact of dust on climate and environment.
Dust can impact climate through influencing the radiative balance of the planet and by affecting continental and ocean biogeochemistry. For example, dust-borne iron fertilization of the oceans is thought to have significantly affected the carbon cycle, a mechanism that could be important in driving ice age cycles.
Paleodata suggest large fluctuations in atmospheric dust over the geological past. However, dust transport models struggle to reproduce observed spatial and temporal dust flux variability. In addition, observational and modeling studies based in the current climate suggest that not all iron in dust is equally available to continental and ocean biota. Iron solubility varies dramatically, depending on mineralogy and state of soils, as well as atmospheric processing by acids. Modeling studies, however, still mostly assume constant solubility.
The workshop brings together scientists, both from the observations (modern and paleo) and the climate modeling community, to discuss recent work addressing these critical uncertainties and progress in determining the emission, transport, and deposition of dust, as well as the sensitivity of continental and ocean biogeochemistry and climate to atmospheric dust input.
Invited speakers
Tim Conway, University of South Florida
Akinori Ito, JAMSTEC
Andy Ridgwell, UC Riverside
Cecile Guieu, LOV-CNRS, University Paris 6, France
Frank Lamy, AWI
Jan-Berend Stuut, Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research
Keith Moore, UC Irvine
Stephanie Kienast, Dalhousie University
Bette Otto-Bliesner, National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA
Mathis Hain, University of Southampton, UK
Workshop co-chairs
Fabrice Lambert (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile)
Natalie Mahowald (Cornell University, USA)
Gisela Winckler (Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, USA)
Abstracts
Abstracts should be sent to dice2018chile
gmail.com (dice2018chile[at]gmail[dot]com) by 15 October 2017.
Financial support
Anyone wanting to apply for financial support should send their current academic position (PhD student, post-doc, assistant prof. etc), where they are based, and how long it has been since their PhD when submitting their abstract. Deadline 15 October 2017.
Registration
To register, send an email to dice2018chilegmail.com (dice2018chile[at]gmail[dot]com) by 12 November 2017.
Further information
Questions can be emailed to Fabrice Lambert at the workshop gmail address, listed above.
Or contact group leader Gisela Winckler: wincklerldeo.columbia.edu (winckler[at]ldeo[dot]columbia[dot]edu)