Aeolian dust modeling over the past four glacial cycles with CLIMBER-2

An integral aeolian dust cycle model for glacial–interglacial climate simulations with the Earth system model of intermediate complexity CLIMBER-2 is introduced, to study the role of aeolian dust for the evolution of glacial cycles. Sources, transport and deposition of dust are modeled for the first time over the past four glacial cycles using internally consistent characteristics of the atmosphere, the terrestrial vegetation coupled to the carbon cycle, and the ice sheets. The space–time variability in the dust deposition reconstructed from ice cores, and marine and terrigenous sediments is reasonably reproduced on the coarse spatial grid of the CLIMBER-2 model for time scales from seasons to hundreds of millennia. Of prime importance for reproducing the variability in dust deposition are changes in dust source areas and dust emission, while changes in dust transport and dust deposition are of secondary importance. The dependence of the dust sources on characteristics of the biosphere and the cryosphere is pertinent for obtaining the strong 100-kyr cyclicity in aeolian dust.