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Global mineral constraints on dust shortwave radiative effects

Nature Geoscience (2026) Cite this article

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Abstract

Mineral dust aerosols affect Earth’s energy balance in multiple ways, including interactions with solar radiation, but this effect remains poorly quantified. A central limitation has been the lack of reliable global information on dust mineral composition, particularly light-absorbing iron oxides. An imaging spectrometer, placed aboard the International Space Station by the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation mission, provides high-resolution, near-global retrievals of surface mineralogy. Here we incorporate these retrievals into four Earth system models to constrain the dust shortwave direct radiative effect. Analysis shows that the retrievals reduce the radiative effect uncertainty by more than a factor of six in both present-day (2007–2011) and late twenty-first-century (2090–2094) climates. This improvement is enabled by tighter constraints on iron oxide content, which reduce its uncertainty contribution from 0.62 W m−2 to 0.10 W m−2. Greatest improvement occurs over the Sahara, where high dust abundance and surface reflectance amplify the influence of iron oxides. Orbital spectroscopy thus shifts the primary uncertainty from mineral composition to processes controlling the spatial distribution of dust. These findings mark a transition towards confident aerosol composition modelling and provide an improved basis for assessing how dust alters Earth’s energy balance today and in a warming future.

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Fig. 1: Schematic presentation of the dust SW DRE constrained by orbital mineral mapping.
The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 2: Improved representation of iron oxide with EMIT.
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Fig. 3: Improved modelling of the dust SW DREE with EMIT.
The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 4: Improved dust SW DRE estimate with EMIT.
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Fig. 5: Reduced present-day dust SW DRE uncertainty with EMIT.
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Fig. 6: Percentage contribution of each uncertainty source to global dust SW DRE variability.
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Data availability

The EMIT soil mineralogy atlas, pre-EMIT soil mineralogy atlases, ensemble model outputs and observations can be accessed via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19714499 (ref. 63).

Code availability

The raw model results were processed using NetCDF Operator (https://nco.sourceforge.net/). The codes to carry out the other analyses are available from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

L.L., N.M.M., R.L.M., B.L.E. and R.N.C. received support from the NASA EMIT project. EMIT is supported by the NASA Earth Venture Instrument programme under the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate. L.L. and N.M.M. also acknowledge assistance from the Department of Energy (DOE) grant DE-SC0021302, and the high-performance computing resources from Derecho provided by NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL), sponsored by the National Science Foundation. R.L.M. also received support from the NASA Modeling, Analysis and Prediction programme. C.P.G.-P, M.G.A., B.L.E. and V.O. acknowledge funding by the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme through the ERC Consolidator Grant FRAGMENT (grant agreement no. 773051). C.P.G.-P, M.G.A. and V.O. acknowledge the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad through the HEAVY (grant no. PID2022-140365OB-I00) and BIOTA (PID2022-139362OB-I00) projects funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF/EU, the AXA Research Fund through the AXA Chair on Sand and Dust Storms at BSC, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement nos. 821205 (FORCeS) and 101137680 (CERTAINTY). A portion of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA (80NM0018D0004).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Longlei Li & Natalie M. Mahowald

  2. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, NY, USA

    Ron L. Miller

  3. Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Barcelona, Spain

    Carlos Pérez García-Pando, María Gonçalves Ageitos & Vincenzo Obiso

  4. ICREA, Catalan Institution for Research and Advances Studies, Barcelona, Spain

    Carlos Pérez García-Pando

  5. Department of Project and Construction Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – Barcelona Tech, Terrassa, Spain

    María Gonçalves Ageitos

  6. NOAA/OAR Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Paul Ginoux

  7. GESTAR-II, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Qianqian Song

  8. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Philip G. Brodrick, David R. Thompson, Olga Kalashnikova & Robert O. Green

  9. Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Roger N. Clark

  10. Department of Geography, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Gregory S. Okin & Bo Zhou

  11. Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Bethany L. Ehlmann

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  1. Longlei Li
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  2. Natalie M. Mahowald
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Contributions

L.L. performed the CESM2 simulations (18 in total), developed the formulations, carried out the analysis (including results from all the four models) and wrote the paper. L.L. and N.M.M. designed the modelling experiments. R.L.M. contributed to the experimental design, performed the ModelE simulations (13 in total), processed the model results and provided the model description. C.P.G.-P. also contributed to the experimental design. V.O. performed the MONARCH simulations (2 in total) and the comparison between models and AERONET dust SSA. M.G.A. processed AERONET data to create the climatological monthly means of dust SSA used in the comparison. V.O., M.G.A. and C.P.G.-P. provided the description of the MONARCH model. P.G. conducted the AM4 simulations (3 in total) and processed the model results. Q.S. and P.G. wrote the description of the AM4 model. D.R.T. wrote the description of the EMIT instrument. P.G.B., M.G.A., R.L.M., C.P.G.-P. and L.L. authored the description of the EMIT soil mineral atlas sections. All remaining authors, along with those previously mentioned, contributed to the generation of the EMIT soil mineral atlases. R.L.M., C.P.G.-P., B.L.E., V.O., M.G.A., D.R.T., P.G.B. and R.N.C. edited the paper. All authors reviewed the paper. R.O.G. is the principal investigator of the EMIT project. N.M.M. is the deputy principal investigator of the EMIT project.

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Correspondence to Longlei Li.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Santiago Gassó and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: Alienor Lavergne and Carolina Ortiz Guerrero, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Li, L., Mahowald, N.M., Miller, R.L. et al. Global mineral constraints on dust shortwave radiative effects. Nat. Geosci. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-026-01996-1

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