Recipient organisationUniversity of ReadingSource-published name: University of Reading
Funding£625K
PeriodJun 2025 — Jun 2029
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Atmospheric dust—blown from deserts, farmlands, and dry lake beds—travels across continents, dimming skies, seeding clouds, and depositing particles into lungs and engines thousands of miles from its source. Despite decades of satellite images and ground-based measurements, scientists cannot reliably predict how much dust will be in the air next week, let alone next decade. Models fail to reproduce dust’s fundamental properties—its size, shape, mineral composition—because each observation technique captures a different facet of the same complex phenomenon. That gap matters: dust disrupts aviation, slashes solar energy output, worsens respiratory disease, and alters regional climate in ways that current forecasts cannot capture. This doctoral network unites European academic and non-academic partners to train a cohort of early-career researchers who will tackle four linked questions: what controls dust’s microphysical properties, how source regions shape those properties, what the socio-economic costs are for health, aviation, and energy, and how dust fits into the global climate system. The work is fundamentally curiosity-driven—understanding a poorly characterised component of the Earth system—but its outputs could sharpen dust forecasts, inform air-quality warnings, and help energy operators anticipate when solar panels will be coated in Saharan grit.
View original technical description
Atmospheric dust gives us one of the most visible and detectable aspects of transboundary transport of atmospheric constituents, impacting visibility, radiation and climate. What is less evident are its impacts on health, transportation and energy production. Atmospheric dust is not fully understood at the fundamental level and models fail to fully reproduce its properties, limiting potential societal benefits that could arise from more accurate predictions. Moreover, dust observations are abundant, but are still under development, and each technique gives a different picture of a phenomenon with multiple facets. Finally, dust affects the environment, society, and several socio-economic sectors. Here, we propose the first doctoral network on a European scale (to our knowledge), bringing together expertise on mineral dust in the atmosphere and multidisciplinary methods. Dust-DN is a strategic, international, and intersectoral alliance of high-profile partners. It will be able to deliver advances in understanding fundamental dust properties, and improve our knowledge and prediction of the socio-economic impacts of dust. We will address the knowledge gaps through creating a cohort of early career scientists within a network between academic and non-academic partners. The doctoral network will be driven by the following research objectives, at the frontier of science on atmospheric mineral dust: (1) Understanding of the fundamentals of dust microphysical properties and processes; (2) Identifying the influence of source regions on atmospheric dust properties; (3) Socio-economic impacts of dust on health, aviation and energy production; and (4) Dust in the global climate system. The partners have unique scientific facilities for addressing these questions, and a number of methodologies will be used, including field observations, remote sensing, numerical modelling and laboratory experiments.
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