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What Coarse Dust Is Teaching Me

Blog post from Fernando Pacheco Bueno


Little did I know dust would become my research focus when I first began designing PM₁₀ and PM₂.₅ monitoring networks in Ecuador in 2015. I was fascinated by what tiny particles can do to human health, lugging high-volume samplers under a near-zenith equatorial sun, while coarse dust (bigger, heavier grains you can almost see) was quietly doing its own mysterious work overhead.

I will not pretend: haboobs, these dense walls of dust kicked up by thunderstorms, are spectacular, although I was not planning to chase them like Brendan Fraser in The Mummy. What was clear was that atmospheric science was the right path for me. I spent three and a half years in Belgium tackling climate and weather modeling questions and getting involved in scientific communication (an early “influencer,” so to speak), promoting the use of Copernicus satellite data worldwide. Along the way I pursued side projects on modeling greenhouse-gas emissions from rivers and on extreme temperature trends in Belgium.

Now, as a DC11 PhD candidate, I am exploring what coarse and super-coarse dust can reveal about how dust interacts with sunlight and heat in the climate system, a process known as radiative forcing. In simple terms, dust does not just hang in the air. It scatters and absorbs sunlight, can cool or warm the atmosphere, and affects how clouds form. These effects are strongly dependent on the particle-size distribution, and growing evidence shows that the coarse size bins matter more than previously expected.

Currently, I am setting up dust-modeling experiments on the MareNostrum5 supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, guided by Dr. Carlos Pérez García-Pando and Dr. María Gonçalves. My first step has been to evaluate current dust schemes against airborne field campaigns such as Fennec 2011 (Figure 1). Next, we will extend the MONARCH climate model’s dust particle-size distribution to include diameters up to 65.2 µm. The ultimate goal is to develop improved schemes that better represent turbulence and its effects on coarse-dust transport and sedimentation.

Figure 1. First simulations of dust concentration at multiple altitudes using state-of-the-art particle-size distributions (up to 20 µm), compared with airborne measurements from the FAAM BAe-146 during Fennec 2011.

The journey is challenging, yet the chance to clarify dust’s role in climate keeps it fascinating. I am proud to belong to the Dust-DN community, which connects peers to share methods, data, and ideas about dust. I look forward to the upcoming events and to contributing results, open datasets, and practical tutorials that others can reuse.