Aeolian dust experiment on climate impact: An overview of Japan-China joint project ADEC

The Aeolian Dust Experiment on Climate Impact (ADEC) was initiated in April 2000 as a joint five-year Japan-China project. The goal was to understand the impact of aeolian dust on climate via radiative forcing (RF). Field experiments and numerical simulations were conducted from the source regions in northwestern China to the downwind region in Japan in order to understand wind erosion processes temporal and spatial distribution of dust during their long-range transportation chemical, physical, and optical properties of dust and the direct effect of radiative forcing due to dust. For this, three intensive observation periods (IOP) were conducted from April 2002 to April 2004. The in situ and network observation results are summarized as follows: (1) In situ observations of the wind erosion process revealed that the vertical profile of moving sand has a clear size dependency with height and saltation flux and that threshold wind velocity is dependent on soil moisture. Results also demonstrated that saltation flux is strongly dependent on the parent soil size distribution of the desert surface. (2) Both lidar observations and model simulations revealed a multiple dust layer in East Asia. A numerical simulation of a chemical transport model, CFORS, illustrated the elevated dust layer from the Taklimakan Desert and the lower dust layer from the Gobi Desert. The global-scale dust model, MASINGAR, also simulated the dust layer in the middle to upper free troposphere in East Asia, which originated from North Africa and the Middle East during a dust storm in March 2003. Raman lidar observations at Tsukuba, Japan, found the ice cloud associated with the dust layer at an altitude of 6 to 9 km. Analysis from lidar and the radio-sonde observation suggested that the Asian dust acted as ice nuclei at the ice-saturated region. These results suggest the importance of dust's climate impact via the indirect effect of radiative forcing due to the activation of dust into ice nuclei. (3) Studies on the aerosol concentration indicated that size distributions of aerosols in downwind regions have bimodal peaks. One peak was in the submicron range and the other in the supermicron range. The main soluble components of the supermicron peak were Na+, Ca2+, NO3-, and Cl-. In the downwind region in Japan, the dust, sea salt, and a mixture of the two were found to be dominant in coarse particles in the mixed boundary layer. (4) Observation of the optical properties of dust by sky-radiometer, particle shoot absorption photometer (PSAP), and Nephelometer indicated that unpolluted dust at source region has a weaker absorption than originally believed. A sensitivity experiment of direct RF by dust indicated that single scattering albedo is the most important of the optical properties of dust and that the sensitivity of instantaneous RF in the shortwave region at the top of the atmosphere to the refractive index strongly depends on surface albedo. A global scale dust model, MASINGAR, was used for evaluation of direct RF due to dust. The results indicated the global mean RF at the top and the bottom of the atmosphere were -0.46 and -2.13 W m(-2) with cloud and were almost half of the RF with cloud-free condition. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.