In this study, Particulate Matter (PM) samples, collected during 2 summer and 2 winter months over a long-term period (1984–2012) at a suburban site in Athens (Greece), were used in order to examine the connection between Sahara dust long range transport events and mass concentrations of the aerosol mineral component, as well as the relative abundance of specific crustal components. As a result...

Dust deposition in the Southern Ocean constitutes a critical modulator of past global climate variability, but how it has varied temporally and geographically is underdetermined. Here, we present data sets of glacial-interglacial dust-supply cycles from the largest Southern Ocean sector, the polar South Pacific, indicating three times higher dust deposition during glacial periods than during in...

[1] Since iron is an important micronutrient, deposition of iron in mineral aerosols can impact the carbon cycle and atmospheric CO2. This paper reviews our current understanding of the global dust cycle and identifies future research needs. The global distribution of desert dust is estimated from a combination of observations of dust from in situ concentration, optical depth, and deposition da...

General Comments: The manuscript titled ‘The concentration, source apportionment and deposition flux of atmospheric particulate inorganic nitrogen during dust events’ written by Jianhua Qi presented the dust impacts on particulate inorganic nitrogen by analyzing the aerosol samples collected at Qingdao, China. The authors divided dust pattern into three parts, and investigated the dry depositio...

[1] We introduce and apply to dust aerosols an efficient method to track tracer age (time since emission) as a function of space and time in large‐scale geophysical models. Our mass‐age tracking (MAT) method follows the full tracer lifecycles directly and does not depend on proxy, ensemble, or Green’s function techniques. MAT sends a mass‐age tracer through the same algorithms that the host mod...

[1] Global models have been used to deduce atmospheric iron supply to the ocean, but the uncertainty remains large. We used a global chemical transport model to investigate the effect of the estimated size distribution of dust on the bioavailable iron deposition. Simulations are performed with six different size distributions for dust aerosols at emission using similar aerosol optical depths (A...

Global atmospheric dust is simulated using DEAD (Dust Entrainment and Deposition model) in combination with the global scale Oslo CTM2 using meteorological data for 1996. Dust sources are calculated both using mean wind speeds with model resolution (T63) and sub-grid wind speeds. Different datasets are used to describe soil erodibility. We explain how the different assumptions on dust productio...

Atmospheric deposition is an important but still poorly constrained source of trace micronutrients to the open ocean because of the dearth of in situ measurements of total deposition (i.e., wet +dry deposition) in remote regions. In this work, we discuss the upper ocean distribution of dissolved Fe and Al in the eastern Indian Ocean along a 95°E meridional transect spanning the Antarctic margin...