22nd. V. M. Goldschmidt Conference

Session 11a. Biogeochemical cycling of aerosols and their effects in the evolving Earth’s climate

Co-conveners: Nicholas Meskhidze (North Carolina State University) and Ina Tegen (Institute for Tropospheric Research, Leipzig, Germany)

Climate projections remain an important scientific goal for the earth science community. A large fraction of the uncertainty in predicting climate change lies in the uncertainties associated with feedbacks in the carbon cycle and aerosol forcing. These feedbacks are the result of land-atmosphere-ocean natural and anthropogenic interactions. Understanding those interactions is of great importance for characterizing possible future changes in the evolving Earth. While aerosols are a source of micronutrients (iron, phosphorus, nitrogen) for the ecosystems, the emission and transformation processes of many aerosols (e.g. desert dust or secondary organic aerosols of biogenic sources) can themselves be influenced by biogeochemical processes. We invite submissions on lab/field measurements, remote sensing, and modeling that lead to process-level understanding of biogeochemical land-atmosphere-ocean interactions. Interdisciplinary research on deposition of dust and volcanic particles, heterogeneous chemical/photochemical transformation of aerosols, and in-situ studies for the effects of aerosols on ocean/terrestrial biogeochemistry are welcome. The earth system models with aerosol deposition coupled to the land-ocean biogeochemistry are in their infancy. Until such models can reliably reproduce the effect of aerosol deposition on carbon cycle, it will be problematic to estimate how changes in aerosol deposition over time might have affected the evolving climate of the Earth.