Establishing a series of dust event case studies for North Africa

Abstract

Dust aerosols often create hazardous air quality conditions that affect human health, visibility, agriculture, and communication in various parts of the world. While substantial progress has been made in dust-event simulation and hazard mitigation over the last several decades, accurately forecasting the spatial and temporal variability of dust emissions continues to be a challenge. This report documents an analysis of atmospheric conditions for a series of dust events in North Africa. The researchers highlight four analyzed events that occurred between January 2016 to present in the following locations: (1) the western Sahara Desert; (2) East Algeria and the Iberian Peninsula; (3) Chad-Bodélé Depression; (4) Algeria and Morocco. For each event, the researchers developed an overview of the general synoptic, mesoscale, and local environmental forcing conditions that controlled the event evolution and used a combination of available lidar data, surface weather observations, upper-air soundings, aerosol optical depth, and satellite imagery to characterize the dust conditions. These assessments will support downstream forecast model evaluation and sensitivity testing; however, the researchers also encourage broader use of these assessments as reference case studies for dust transport, air quality modeling, remote sensing, soil erosion, and land management research applications.