Abstract. Dust particles from high latitudes have a potentially large local,
regional, and global significance to climate and the environment as
short-lived climate forcers, air pollutants, and nutrient sources.
Identifying the locations of local dust sources and their emission,
transport, and deposition processes is important for understanding the
multiple impacts of high-latitude dust (HLD) on the Earth's systems. Here, we identify, describe, and quantify the source intensity (SI) values, which show the potential of soil surfaces for dust emission scaled to values 0 to
1 concerning globally best productive sources, using the Global Sand and
Dust Storms Source Base Map (G-SDS-SBM). This includes 64 HLD sources in our collection for the northern (Alaska, Canada, Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard, Sweden, and Russia) and southern (Antarctica
and Patagonia) high latitudes. Activity from most of these HLD sources shows seasonal character. It is estimated that high-latitude land areas with
higher (SI ≥0.5), very high (SI ≥0.7), and the highest potential
(SI ≥0.9) for dust emission cover >1 670 000 km2,
>560 000 km2, and >240 000 km2,
respectively. In the Arctic HLD region (≥60∘ N), land area
with SI ≥0.5 is 5.5 % (1 035 059 km2), area with SI ≥0.7 is
2.3 % (440 804 km2), and area with SI ≥0.9 is 1.1 % (208 701 km2). Minimum SI values in the northern HLD region are about 3 orders of magnitude smaller, indicating that the dust sources of this region
greatly depend on weather conditions. Our spatial dust source distribution
analysis modeling results showed evidence supporting a northern HLD belt, defined as the area north of 50∘ N, with
a “transitional HLD-source area” extending at latitudes 50–58∘ N
in Eurasia and 50–55∘ N in Canada and a “cold HLD-source area” including areas north of 60∘ N in Eurasia and north of
58∘ N in Canada, with currently “no dust source” area between the
HLD and low-latitude dust (LLD) dust belt, except for British Columbia. Using the global atmospheric transport model SILAM, we estimated that 1.0 % of the global
dust emission originated from the high-latitude regions. About 57 % of the
dust deposition in snow- and ice-covered Arctic regions was from HLD
sources. In the southern HLD region, soil surface conditions are favorable for dust emission during the whole year. Climate change can cause a decrease in the duration of snow cover, retreat of glaciers, and an increase in drought, heatwave intensity, and frequency, leading to the increasing frequency of topsoil conditions
favorable for dust emission, which increases the probability of dust storms.
Our study provides a step forward to improve the representation of HLD in
models and to monitor, quantify, and assess the environmental and climate
significance of HLD.
