Abstract
Dust storms in North China result in high concentrations of airborne dust particles, which cause detrimental effects on human health as well as social and economic losses and environmental degradation. To investigate the impact of land surface processes on dust storms, we simulate two dust storm events in North China during spring 2002 using two versions of a dust storm prediction system developed by the Institute for Atmospheric Physics (IAP) in Beijing, China. The primary difference between the IAP Sandstorm Prediction System (IAPS 1.0) and more recent version (IAPS 2.0) is the land surface modeling. IAPS 1.0 is based on the Oregon State University (OSU) land surface model, whereas the latest version of the dust storm prediction (IAPS 2.0) uses NOAH land surface schemes for land surface modeling within a meteorological model, MM5. This work investigates whether the improved land surface modeling affects modeling of sandstorms. It is shown that an integrated sandstorm management system can be used to aid the following tasks: ensure sandstorm monitoring and warning; incorporate weather forecasts; ascertain the risk of a sandstorm disaster; integrate multiple technologies (for example, GIS, remote sensing, and information processing technology); track the progress of the storm in real-time; exhibit flexibility, accuracy and reliability (by using multiple sources of data, including in-situ meteorological observations); and monitor PM10 and PM2.5 dust concentrations in airborne dustfalls. The results indicate that with the new land surface scheme, the simulation of soil moisture is greatly improved, leading to a better estimate of the threshold frictional velocity, a key parameter for the estimating surface dust emissions. In this study, we also discuss specific mechanisms by which land surface processes affect dust storm modeling and make recommendations for further improvements to numerical dust storm simulations.
Highlights
While sandstorms and subsequent airborne dustfalls are natural phenomena, climate change and land use changes associated with deforestation, agricultural expansion, and urbanization are thought to be associated with the frequency of sandstorms around the world [1,2,3]
To better understand the impact of land surface processes on dust storm simulations, we modeled the northeast Asian dust storms in the spring of 2002 with two versions of a dust storm numerical modeling and prediction system developed at the Institute for Atmospheric Physics
A complicated dust storm event occurred on 21–24 April 2002 in North China, which was affected by a southeastward moving cyclone, a cold front and an anticyclone system
Summary
While sandstorms and subsequent airborne dustfalls are natural phenomena, climate change and land use changes associated with deforestation, agricultural expansion, and urbanization are thought to be associated with the frequency of sandstorms around the world [1,2,3]. IAPS 1.0 consists of the Meso-scale Meteorological Model (MM5) jointly developed by Pennsylvania State University (PSU) and National Center for Atmospheric Research [56], together with OSU LSM, a wind erosion model, a dust transportation-deposition scheme, pre-processor system, and a GIS database (Figure 1). The pre-processor components include a wind erosion model, dust transportation model and a GIS database with categories for vegetation, soil, and land use. At each time step u* (from the planetary boundary layer scheme) and surface soil moisture (from the land surface scheme) are used by the wind erosion model to calculate the dust emission rate for six particle-size groups. The impact of land surface processes on the dust storm simulations was investigated
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