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Welcome to the Dust Entrainment and Deposition (DEAD) Model Homepage

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What is DEAD?

The Dust Entrainment and Deposition Model (DEAD) is a wind erosion and mineral dust transport model. DEAD may be run standalone, as a box model (BXM), or as a mineral dust module embedded in a large scale atmospheric host model. DEAD is currently embedded in MATCH, a Chemical Transport Model (CTM), Univeristy of Oslo CTM2, the UC Irvine CTM, and in the NCAR CCM, a General Circulation Model (GCM). A reference article describing the physics of DEAD version 1.x is in J. Geophys. Res., and numerous other articles using or referring to DEAD are listed below.

In BXM mode, DEAD provides a flexible front-end for specification of environmental parameters (e.g., wind speed) and microphysical parameters. This mode is useful for offline sensitivity studies, prediction of erosion in wind tunnels and source regions, and comparison to station data. In CTM mode, DEAD predicts realistic evolution of dust storms and transport based on analyzed global meteorology. This mode is useful for hindcasting and short-term forecasting of dust events (e.g., during field campaigns) and present day dust climatology. In GCM mode, DEAD provides radiative feedbacks which alter and respond to the climate of the host GCM. This mode is useful for analyzing the effect of dust on climate, and the sensitivity of dust loading to past, present, and future climate changes. DEAD comprises the actual subroutines used in both the CCM and MATCH, along with driver subroutines for offline (box model) operation. DEAD is freely available (see below) and is a useful tool for scientific studies of wind erosion, mineral dust aerosol, and heterogeneous chemistry.

DEAD News

Documentation and User's Guide

The nascent DEAD User's Guide comes in PDF format:

Currently, the guide only contains descriptions of the command line switches and output fields. Contributions of additional sections are most welcome.

DEAD On-line Box Model

DEAD compiles into a box model that you can run on-line here (yes, it runs from the shell command line, too). This unusual feature raises some eyebrows (or, in the case of the hirstute author, eyebrow). What is the purpose of the box model? We believe that the same processes which generate dust in laboratory wind tunnels also generate most large-scale dust events. This is a difficult hypothesis to test because of the mismatch of scales and scarcity of accurate measurements of natural dust storms. DEAD is testable against station and wind tunnel timeseries precisely so we can improve the wind tunnel-scale processes which contribute to observations. We want (you to help us) to test our GCM dust model against any and all station and wind tunnel dust measurements and to use the resulting biases to understand erosive processes better and to refine DEAD.

DEAD should nail well-controlled laboratory and field wind tunnel measurements. That way, biases in the global predictions of DEAD can be constrained to errors in input data or representation of large scale processes (transport, mixing, deposition). We have one semi-funded and one submitted proposal to use this technique to improve understanding and representation (in DEAD) of dust emissions using in situ measurements from the Columbia Plateau, Mojave Desert, and Aral Sea. Please contact us if you are interested in evaluating your favorite dust measurement timeseries (or do it yourself and let us know what you find!).

The Column Radiation Model (CRM) is another example of a physical process model that works in a reduced dimension mode, in this case a single vertical column. We have modified the CRM radiation code (which may be used in CCM 3.6) to account for the dust predicted by DEAD, so the two are synergistic. Contact us for more details.

DEAD Manuscripts/Papers

Reference Article

Articles which use DEAD extensively/exclusively

Articles which use DEAD, but which are not focused on dust

Input Datasets and Selected Results

These data are free and publicly available. They are stored in the self-describing netCDF format. We encourage you to use these data in your studies. No offer of co-authorship is necessary. Custom datasets are available upon request.

Version Summary

Movies Summary

Source Code.

The distribution includes the complete source code necessary to build and to run (in box model mode) DEAD on your own machine.

Additional software is required to build and run DEAD: Optional software: By default, DEAD uses the Alfaro and Gomes (2001) saltation-sanblasting implemented as look-up tables (to increase speed). The lookup tables are computed off-line by a stand-alone saltation-sandblasting program/module (sltsbl.F90), and then munged into a DEAD subroutine/module (dstsltsbl.F90). If you want to explore, re-formulate, or improve the saltation-sandblasting in DEAD, we recommend that you start from the sltsbl module: We are very interested in improving the modularity, readability, testability, and commented-ness of sltsbl.F90. Please send us your improvements! We're also very interested in implementing the Menut et al. (2005) algorithms in DEAD so if anyone has this code please make it available.

I will arrange CVS access to DEAD (and sltsbl) for anyone who asks.

README/INSTALL/FAQ/ChangeLog/TODO

Files containing useful information about the current DEAD distribution:

The Makefile that comes with the DEAD box model requires a utility called makdep to generate dependencies for the Fortran programs. Download the source code, makdep.c, compile it with cc -o makdep makdep.c, and place the resulting executable in your path before you try to build DEAD.

Known Problems with DEAD:

Mail List for Discussion of Dust Entrainment and Deposition Modeling