Abstract
This study investigates four types of synoptic dust events in the Middle East region, including cyclonic, pre-frontal, post-frontal and Shamal dust storms. For each of these types, three intense and pervasive dust events are analyzed from a synoptic meteorological and numerical simulation perspective. The performance of 9 operational dust models in forecasting these dust events in the Middle East is qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated against Terra-MODIS observations and AERONET measurements during the dust events. The comparison of model AOD outputs with Terra-MODIS retrievals reveals that despite the significant discrepancies, all models have a relatively acceptable performance in forecasting the AOD patterns in the Middle East. The models enable to represent the high AODs along the dust plumes, although they underestimate them, especially for cyclonic dust storms. In general, the outputs of the NASA-GEOS and DREAM8-MACC models present greater similarity with the satellite and AERONET observations in most of the cases, also exhibiting the highest correlation coefficient, although it is difficult to introduce a single model as the best for all cases. Model AOD predictions over the AERONET stations showed that DREAM8-MACC exhibited the highest R2 of 0.78, followed by NASA_GEOS model (R2 = 0.74), which both initially use MODIS data assimilation. Although the outputs of all models correspond to valid time more than 24 h after the initial time, the effect of data assimilation on increasing the accuracy is important. The different dust emission schemes, soil and vegetation mapping, initial and boundary meteorological conditions and spatial resolution between the models, are the main factors influencing the differences in forecasting the dust AODs in the Middle East.
Highlights
Dust storms are considered environmental hazards due to their high impact on climate change, widespread environmental degradation, financial and human losses [1,2,3].The impacts of dust aerosols on radiative forcing, atmospheric circulation and climate, especially in the Middle East, have been well recognized in previous studies (e.g., [4,5,6]).Air pollution arising from dust storms poses an extra threat to public health with serious respiratory and heart diseases [7,8,9]
In the pre-frontal dust storm of 30 March 2018 (Figure 1c), dust covered a large area from west Arabia to south Iraq and west Iran, lying in front of or below cloud masses that were associated with a frontal system
These dust storms were caused by cold fronts that usually stretched from southeast Turkey and northern Iraq to northeast Saudi Arabia [44]
Summary
Dust storms are considered environmental hazards due to their high impact on climate change, widespread environmental degradation, financial and human losses [1,2,3]. Due to the impact of various factors (dust schemes, initial and boundary conditions, soil characteristics, dynamic processes, spatial resolution) that affect the forecasting and simulations of dust events from numerical models [43,51,53,70], the outputs of 9 operational dust forecasting models included in https://sds-was.aemet.es (accessed on 12–14 April 2021) are examined and inter-compared during the selected dust storms in the Middle East. To evaluate the performance of these models in forecasting the examined dust storms, the AOD outputs over a selected spatial domain in the Middle East are qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated against the Terra-MODIS satellite data with 1◦ × 1◦ spatial resolution (level 3), retrieved by combined Dark Target and Deep Blue algorithms.
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