DuPlum Climate Forcings Dataset: Simple plums for natural mineral dust aerosol

DuPlum is a parameterization designed to represent the optical properties of mineral dust plumes for use in climate models. The code is largely based on code from the simple plumes parameterization of Stevens et al., (2017), which was originally developed for anthropogenic aerosol optical properties. We modified that framework for natural mineral dust by constructing dust plumes, for which the data is made available here. DuPlum is observation-based, computationally efficient, and easy to adapt, that enables flexible and fast experimentation. It allows a simple representation of a monthly climatology for dust aerosol extinction for use in global weather and climate models, taking observational uncertainties into account. Each plume exhibits a distinct seasonal cycle and interannual variability. The interannual variability is incorporated through an annual scaling factor, specific to each plume, and is derived from the decadally averaged mineral dust emissions provided by Leung et al. (2025) for the years 1851-2000. The year 2000 is used as a reference year and the scaling factor remains constant thereafter. A complete documentation of DuPlum and comparison of the resulting dust optical depth against other data sets is in preparation (Sudarchikova et al., in prep.).