Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Global Estimates Of Mineral Dust Aerosol Iron And Aluminum Solubility That Account For Particle Size Using Diffusion-Controlled And Surface-Area-Controlled Approximations, Qin Han, Charles S. Zender, J. Keith Moore, Clifton S. Buck, Ying Chen, Anne Johansen, Christopher I. Measures

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

Mineral aerosol deposition is recognized as the dominant source of iron to the open ocean and the solubility of iron in the dust aerosol is highly variable, with measurements ranging from 0.01–80%. Global models have difficulty capturing the observed variations in solubility, and have ignored the solubility dependence on aerosol size. We introduce two idealized physical models to estimate the size dependence of mineral aerosol solubility: a diffusion‐controlled model and a surface‐area‐controlled model. These models produce differing time‐ and space‐varying solubility maps for aerosol Fe and Al given the dust age at deposition, size‐resolved dust entrainment fields, and the aerosol …