A New Frontier: Aerosol-Biogeochemistry-Climate Interactions

For climate sciences, it is well known that aerosols, as well as the carbon cycle, are important to understand: not just the physical climate system response. However, these fields are traditionally considered separately, and the interactions between aerosols and the carbon cycle have usually been ignored. But more recent research suggests the importance of these 'second order' effects. How did we get to this point, and how to we proceed to understand such cross-disciplinary research is the goal of this talk. Atmospheric aerosol deposition is an important source of nutrients as well as pollution to ecosystems on land and the oceans. Humans have heavily perturbed the sources of most important aerosol species, potentially affecting carbon uptake and loss from ecosystems, and this will impact climate.