Abstract
The Taklimakan Desert is known to be one of the world’s major sources of aeolian dust particles. Continuous images with 10-min temporal and 2-km spatial resolutions from a new-generation geostationary meteorological satellite captured the lifecycle (generation, evolution and outflow) of a previously unrecognized type of Taklimakan dust storm. The dust storm showed an anti-clockwise spiral structure and a clear core and behaved like a “dust vortex”. From image analysis, the horizontal scale and temporal lifetime of the dust vortex were estimated to be 600 km and 36 hours, respectively. We found that a strong pressure trough (cut-off low), along with a cold air mass located on the northwestern side of the Taklimakan Desert and the high mountains surrounding the Taklimakan Desert, played important roles in the formation and evolution of the dust vortex.
Highlights
The Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) onboard Himawari-8, a new-generation geostationary meteorological satellite (GMS) put into operation on July 7, 2015, has 16 observational bands from visible to infrared, with unprecedented spatial (0.5–1.0 km for visible and 1–2 km for infrared) and temporal (10-minute) resolution covering wide areas of the globe (East and Southeast Asia, the western Pacific Ocean, Oceania, and the Australian continent)[9]
The dust storm advanced to the east, and its spiral structure was broken around the eastern corridor (Fig. 1e,f)
We investigated the meteorological conditions surrounding the generation and evolution of the dust vortex using meteorological reanalysis data and found that a strong pressure trough that advanced in the northwestern side of the TD characterized the meteorological conditions (Fig. 4)
Summary
The Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) onboard Himawari-8, a new-generation geostationary meteorological satellite (GMS) put into operation on July 7, 2015, has 16 observational bands from visible to infrared, with unprecedented spatial (0.5–1.0 km for visible and 1–2 km for infrared) and temporal (10-minute) resolution covering wide areas of the globe (East and Southeast Asia, the western Pacific Ocean, Oceania, and the Australian continent)[9]. From 30 April to 1 May 2017, continuous images from AHI captured details of a dust storm with a spiral structure in the TD. The dust storm had a clear core and horizontal and temporal scales of 600 km and Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, 305–8577, Japan. We investigated the generation and evolution of the dust storm using observations near the surface and from space and through model simulation with a regional-scale meteorology–chemistry model
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