Machine learning-based prediction of sand and dust storm sources in arid Central Asia

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the emergence of multisource data and the development of cloud computing platforms, accurate prediction of event-scale dust source regions based on machine learning (ML) methods should be considered, especially accounting for the temporal variability in sample and predictor variables. Arid Central Asia (ACA) is recognized as one of the world’s primary potential sand and dust storm (SDS) sources. In this study, based on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, four ML methods were used for SDS source prediction in ACA. Fourteen meteorological and terrestrial factors were selected as influencing factors controlling SDS source susceptibility and applied in the modeling process. Generally, the results revealed that the random forest (RF) algorithm performed best, followed by the gradient boosting tree (GBT), maximum entropy (MaxEnt) model and support vector machine (SVM). The Gini impurity index results of the RF model indicated that the wind speed played the most important role in SDS source prediction, followed by the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). This study could facilitate the development of programs to reduce SDS risks in arid and semiarid regions, particularly in ACA.