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Mineral dust aerosols impact Earth's radiation budget through interactionswith clouds, ecosystems, and radiation, which constitutes a substantialuncertainty in understanding past and predicting future climate changes. One ofthe causes of this large uncertainty is that the size distribution of emitteddust aerosols is poorly understood. The present study shows that regional andglobal circulation models (GCMs) overestimate the emitted fraction of clayaerosols (< 2 {\mu}m diameter) by a factor of ~2 - 8 relative to measurements.This discrepancy is resolved by deriving a simple theoretical expression of theemitted dust size distribution that is in excellent agreement withmeasurements. This expression is based on the physics of the scale-invariantfragmentation of brittle materials, which is shown to be applicable to dustemission. Because clay aerosols produce a strong radiative cooling, theoverestimation of the clay fraction causes GCMs to also overestimate theradiative cooling of a given quantity of emitted dust. On local and regionalscales, this affects the magnitude and possibly the sign of the dust radiativeforcing, with implications for numerical weather forecasting and regionalclimate predictions in dusty regions. On a global scale, the dust cycle in mostGCMs is tuned to match radiative measurements, such that the overestimation ofthe radiative cooling of a given quantity of emitted dust has likely causedGCMs to underestimate the global dust emission rate. This implies that thedeposition flux of dust and its fertilizing effects on ecosystems may besubstantially larger than thought.

A scaling theory for the size distribution of emitted dust aerosols suggests climate models underestimate the size of the global dust cycle