Monitoring present-day Saharan dust above and below the ocean surface
- 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, 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 2022 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 directly below the major dust Saharan-dust plume offshore northwest Africa. 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., Matzenbacher, B., and Van der Does, M.: Monitoring present-day Saharan dust above and below the ocean surface, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-6171, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-6171, 2023.
