Abstract
Abstract. Precipitation and desert dust event occurrence time series measured in the Canary Islands region are examined with the primary intention of exploring their scaling characteristics as well as their spatial variability in terms of the island's topography and geographical orientation. In particular, the desert dust intrusion regime in the islands is studied in terms of its relationship with visibility. Analysis of dust and rainfall events over the archipelago exhibits distributions in time that obey power laws. Results show that the rain process presents a high clustering and irregular pattern on short timescales and a more scattered structure for long ones. In contrast, dustiness presents a more uniform and dense structure and, consequently, a more persistent behaviour on short timescales. It was observed that the fractal dimension of rainfall events shows an important spatial variability, which increases with altitude, as well as towards northern latitudes and western longitudes.
Highlights
Life on Earth critically depends on freshwater availability
It can be observed that there is no significant correlation between the intensity of the dust intrusions and their durations
Determination coefficients of linear regression are R2 = 0.09 for Gran Canaria, R2 = 0.18 for La Palma and R2 = 0.16 for Fuerteventura. These time series present a wide interannual variability, which becomes clearer in the bar chart depicted in Fig. 5, in which the height of each bar indicates the number of events recorded during that year
Summary
Human life, settlement, and any of their activities are restricted by the existence of such a vital resource. This fact is evident in desert, arid, and semi-arid zones, where prolonged droughts are commonly related to health problems, soil erosion and massive population displacements. Potter and Colman, 2003) Another aspect of huge importance for human life and the environment is the quality of the surrounding air. In this sense, air composition normally includes some fraction of solid material, which generally results from anthropogenic air pollution, biomass burning, or soil erosion by wind. Dust storms reduce visibility and disrupt daily life and economic activities
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