Biological residues define the ice nucleation properties of soil dust
By F. Conen, C. Morris, J. Leifeld, M. Yakutin, C. Alewell. 2011
195 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract. Soil dust is a major driver of ice nucleation in clouds leading to precipitation. It consists largely of mineral particles with a small fraction of organic matter constituted mainly of remains of micro-organisms that participated in degrading plant debris before their own decay. Some micro-organisms have been shown to be much better ice nuclei than the most efficient soil mineral. Yet, current aerosol schemes in global climate models do not consider a difference between soil dust and mineral dust in terms of ice nucleation activity. Here, we show that particles from the clay and silt size fraction of four different soils naturally associated with 0.7 to 11.8 % organic carbon (w/w) can have up to four orders of magnitude more ice nucleation sites per unit mass active in the immersion freezing mode at −12 °C than montmorillonite, the nucleation properties of which are often used to represent those of mineral dusts in modelling studies. Most of this activity was lost after heat treatment. Removal of biological residues reduced ice nucleation activity to, or below that of montmorillonite. Desert soils, inherently low in organic content, are a large natural source of dust in the atmosphere. In contrast, agricultural land use is concentrated on fertile soils with much larger organic matter contents than found in deserts. It is currently estimated that the contribution of agricultural soils to the global dust burden is less than 20 %. Yet, these disturbed soils can contribute ice nuclei to the atmosphere of a very different and much more potent kind than mineral dusts.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Earth-Surface Processes, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc0866cf6854c72d651e1cfdf2ab074f51d5a337
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Citations in the corpus
- The adsorption of fungal ice-nucleating proteins on mineral dusts: a terrestrial reservoir of atmospheric ice-nucleating particles (2016, methodology): “Phys., 16, 7879–7887, 2016 www.atmos-chem-phys.net/16/7879/2016/ ter residues within soil dusts are potentially the largest contributor to the burden of atmospheric INPs at temperatures above −15 ◦C on a global basis (O’Sullivan et al., 2014; Conen et al., 2011).”
- Ice nucleation activity in the widespread soil fungus Mortierella alpina (2015, unknown): “In soil and decaying vegetation, these cell-free IN might contribute to the as-yet-unknown reservoir of biological residues which can enhance the ice nucleation activity of soil dust and boundary layer atmospheric aerosols (Conen et al., 2011; Garcia et al., 2012; O’Sullivan et al., 2014; Tobo et al”
- A technique for quantifying heterogeneous ice nucleation in microlitre supercooled water droplets (2014, methodology): “Our experimental approach builds on techniques employing aliquots of water much larger than the dimensions of typical cloud droplets which have been used since the very early days of ice nucleation studies (Vali, 1971, 1995) and continue to be used in the present day (Stopelli et al., 2014; Conen et”
- Overview of Ice Nucleating Particles (2017, background): “…components can also be attached to other particles such as dust or sea salt enhancing the ice nucleating ability of these carriers thus increasing their atmospheric relevance (Augustin-Bauditz et al. 2016; Conen et al. 2011; Ladino et al. 2016; O’Sullivan et al. 2014, 2015; Tobo et al. 2014).”
- Improvements to an Empirical Parameterization of Heterogeneous Ice Nucleation and Its Comparison with Observations (2013, background): “An organic IN source from decomposing vegetation has been observed (Schnell andVali 1972; Conen et al. 2011).”