Preliminary Summary of ADEC:Japan-Sino Joint Project on Aeolian Dust Research

摘要

Aeolian dust drifting from arid and semi-arid regions of the continents causes a serious damage to the local ecosystem and human society in these regions. In addition, it is an important factor of the climate system . Aeolian dust particles in the atmosphere play an important role in the radiative forcing of the atmosphere via scattering and absorbing of short and long wave radiation. After being deposited in the ocean (Duce et al., 1980), aeolian dust is thought to act as nutrient salts which will cause changes in the primary production of phytoplanktons. This process is one of the major factors of the carbon dioxide cycle in the global scale (Duce et al., 1991; Dayan et al., 1991). However, there still remains large uncertainties in the understanding of the whole process of dust, including generation, long-range transport, deposition, chemical and physical property, and in the model representations of dust distribution and its radiative forcing in the global and/or regional scale.