Ocean temperature forcing by aerosols across the Atlantic tropical cyclone development region

[1] Recent work has shown a statistical climatological link between African dust outbreaks and North Atlantic tropical cyclone frequency and intensity. However, a definite causal link between year-to-year changes in African dust and Atlantic tropical cyclones has yet to be proven. Here we show that variability in Atlantic dust cover is linked to changes in tropical cyclone activity through the aerosols’ surface radiative forcing, which has a net cooling effect on tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures. In this manuscript we describe a new methodology for incorporating more than 25 years of satellite observations of aerosols into a simple model that estimates the aerosol direct effect and its impact on tropical eastern Atlantic Ocean temperatures. The output from our model suggests that African dust outbreaks play a nonnegligible role in the evolution of eastern Atlantic Ocean temperatures. Using the strong relationship between temperatures G Geochemistry Geophysics Geosystems