Papers
14
Total Citations
590
H-Index
9
About
Paola Formenti is a leading atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on mineral dust aerosols, biomass burning emissions, and their optical properties and radiative impacts across African and Mediterranean regions. Her work has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of how desert dust and smoke aerosols influence regional and global climate systems. Formenti's most cited contribution — a 2008 study on dust aerosol size, shape, and composition collected during the AMMA-DABEX field campaign over Niger (200 citations) — established critical benchmarks for characterizing Saharan dust properties from airborne measurements. Her early work on Saharan dust optical properties during the ACE 2 experiment (1998, 73 citations) helped lay foundational knowledge in aerosol characterization. Through major international field campaigns including Fennec, ORACLES, ADRIMED, and AEROCLO-sA, she has consistently bridged observational data with modeling frameworks to constrain aerosol radiative effects over Africa and the Atlantic. More recently, Formenti has pushed the frontier toward mineralogical specificity, demonstrating that regional variations in iron oxide composition significantly affect dust shortwave absorption — a finding with important implications for Earth system modeling. Her sustained contributions across decades of fieldwork, remote sensing analysis, and climate modeling make her an authoritative voice in aerosol-climate research.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 3Optical properties of Saharan dust during ACE 273 citations · 1998
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- 5Variability of aerosol vertical distribution in the Sahel49 citations · 2010
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