EGU22-5364
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-5364
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Monitoring present-day Saharan dust at sea

Jan-Berend Stuut1,2, Catarina Guerreiro3, Geert-Jan Brummer1, and Michèlle van der Does4
Jan-Berend Stuut et al.
  • 1NIOZ - Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Ocean Systems, Den Burg, the Netherlands (jbstuut@nioz.nl)
  • 2VU - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Faculty of Science, Department of Earth Sciences, the Netherlands
  • 3MARE - Marine Environmental Sciences Center, University of Lisbon, Portugal
  • 4AWI - Alfred Wegener Institute for Marine and Polar Research, Bremerhaven, Germany

Mineral dust plays an important role in the ocean’s carbon cycle through the input of nutrients and metals which potentially fertilise phytoplankton, and by ballasting organic matter from the surface ocean to the sea floor. However, time series and records of open-ocean dust deposition fluxes are sparse. Here, we present a series of Saharan dust collected  between 2015 and 2020 by dust-collecting buoys that are monitoring dust in the equatorial North Atlantic Ocean as well as by moored sediment traps at the buoys' positions at ~21°N/21°W and ~11°N/23°W. We present dust-flux data as well as particle-size distribution data, and make a comparison of the dust collected from the atmosphere at the ocean surface with the dust settling through the ocean and intercepted by the submarine sediment traps. See: www.nioz.nl/dust

How to cite: Stuut, J.-B., Guerreiro, C., Brummer, G.-J., and van der Does, M.: Monitoring present-day Saharan dust at sea, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-5364, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-5364, 2022.

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