Desert dust in rural western US; the influence of dust storms, large particles, and land-use change on aerosol loads
Abstract
Atmospheric aerosols are common in urban settings as well as dryland rural environments and are important to both climate and biogeochemical cycling. Most urban and far traveled aerosols are less than 10 micrometers in diameter with many particles in the less than 2.5 or 1 micrometer-size classes. Small aerosols, including many generated by industrial activity, are the focus of federal environmental law and have a major impact on human health. In rural areas of the western US, however, these small industrially derived particles appear to make up a small part of the overall aerosol load. Rather, dust in the rural West is dominated by mineral aerosols including a large amount of particles that range in size from 10 to 40 microns. These particles can travel for hundreds of kilometers, particularly during periods when dust storms are common. In the dusty spring and summer periods in and around Canyonlands and Mesa Verde National Parks, large particles (particles greater than 10 micrometers in diameter) appear to contribute between 50 and 90% to the overall particle load several meters above the ground. During large dust storms, concentrations of total suspended particulates increase by a factor of 8 to 10 while particles less than 10 micrometers in diameter are minimally affected. The presence of large particles in the atmosphere of the rural West is notable for several reasons. First, the majority of the existing aerosol monitoring networks focus on the small particle-size classes of less than 2.5 and 10 microns. Because many aerosol-collection instruments are designed with specific particle-size cutoff criteria, these instruments and the networks that depend on them are effectively blind to the larger particles that can dominate aerosol loads in the West. Second, for large portions of the year including the spring and summer months when dust storms are common, large particles likely play a major role in visibility restrictions across the protected airsheds of the western US. Finally, the sources of large mineral aerosols are different from those of industrial aerosols that dominate urban areas, and thus the concentrations of large particles do not correspond with variations in urban concentrations of small industrial aerosols. Mineral aerosols are produced by both natural erosion of desert soils and the variety of human activities such as grazing, resource extraction, and recreation that lead to surface disturbance. In large areas of the rural West, resource extraction and recreational activities have been increasing leading to the potential for increases in mineral aerosol concentrations. Without improved monitoring capabilities that focus on these large particles, any potential long-term changes in large-particle aerosol loads in the rural west will continue to go undetected.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AGUFM.U11A0001P
- Keywords:
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- 0305 ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE / Aerosols and particles;
- 0478 BIOGEOSCIENCES / Pollution: urban;
- regional and global;
- 1615 GLOBAL CHANGE / Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- 1631 GLOBAL CHANGE / Land/atmosphere interactions