Interconnected soil properties modulate compound hurricane-dust events that impact the Americas

Abstract

Abstract In 2024, several Atlantic tropical cyclones encountered trans-Atlantic African dust, altering weather, air quality, and deposition across the Americas. Using state-of-the-art Earth system modeling, this study highlights that interconnected basic (mineralogy, texture) and state (moisture, temperature) soil properties modulate the complex hurricane-dust interactions and their combined impacts. We comprehensively evaluate and update model representations of soil properties, their interconnections (e.g., soil texture impacts on soil moisture), and feedbacks to atmospheric conditions. This is enabled by jointly applying remotely sensed information from NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation and Soil Moisture Active Passive missions, multi-sensor aerosol observations, mineralogy-dependent reactive uptake coefficients and hygroscopicity parameters derived from laboratory experiments, as well as various in situ surface and atmosphere datasets. Our results demonstrate that the magnitude, or even the direction, of some soil-property effects varies by event and depends on how models represent the sensitivity of key processes (e.g., dust emissions) to soil and atmospheric conditions over the lifetimes of hurricane-dust events. Our findings underline the importance of accurately representing soil properties and soil-property-sensitive processes for better understanding and modeling compound hurricane-dust events. Future research on these aspects can benefit from intensive, multidisciplinary field experiments for compound events along with multi-model frameworks.