Amato Evan
University of California-San Diego, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Mineral dust blown off dry land may make up as much as two-thirds of the particles in Earth's air. Dust levels have risen sharply since the Industrial Revolution, possibly because more land has been cleared for farming.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Physics
- Topics
mineral dust
atmospheric aerosols
dust storms
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Estimate how much dust downslope windstorms and haboobs emit globally, by feeding surface winds from high-resolution 3.75 km MPAS simulations into an offline dust emission model.
- Adjust the CESM climate model to reproduce dust from these small-scale wind events, and run nudged simulations to compare dust levels and climate effects with real observations.
- Measure size-resolved changes in the concentration of super-coarse and giant dust particles, larger than 10 microns, during vertical turbulent and horizontal transport, to test whether theory overestimates their settling.
- Measure the size-resolved upward flux of giant dust at its source to test whether emission is one to several orders of magnitude greater than theory predicts.
More about the research
Dust affects climate in several ways. It cools the planet by reflecting sunlight, warms it by trapping heat, and changes clouds. It also lowers air quality and feeds ocean life with iron. Its effects remain very uncertain. Two projects tackle missing pieces: the brief, small-scale windstorms that lift much of the dust, and the surprisingly large dust particles that travel far from deserts.
Why it matters
Better accounting of how windstorms lift dust, and how large dust grains travel, could reduce uncertainty in climate predictions. This includes predictions of how human land use changes dust levels. More accurate weather and climate models could improve forecasts of dust-related air quality, and of how dust affects sunlight, clouds and the nutrients that reach marine ecosystems.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Gregory Jenkins
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science
Project how Saharan dust emission and transport across West Africa and the Atlantic will change over the 21st century, using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) regional model with the GOCART dust module driven by CMIP5 global climate simulations under three emission scenarios.
Hamish Gordon
Carnegie Mellon University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Develop a new parameterization of atmospheric new particle formation that accounts for temperature and ions, using CERN CLOUD chamber data and field measurements, and evaluate it in climate models.
Rong Fu
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Simulate mesoscale convective systems over the Congo Basin with the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS), a global cloud-resolving model, to explain how these storm clusters start, develop and travel.
The school
University of California-San Diego: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 637 research doctorates a year.
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