Integrated Analysis of Satellite and Ground-based Meteorological Observations of Asian Dust Outbreaks in Spring of 2001

A better understanding of Asian dust sources and transport routes of dust outbreaks is critical to improving the prediction of various dust impacts over the East Asia- North Pacific region. This study presents the results of an integrated analysis of satellite observations (TOMS, SeaWiFS, and MODIS) and meteorological data provided by the weather stations in China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan in conjunction with the PSU/NCAR Mesoscale Modeling System (MM5). In addition, the meteorological fields predicted by the MM5 model were used to drive the dust module, DuMo, to estimate dust emission from individual dust sources. The goal of this study is to identify the active dust sources during the Spring of 2001, estimate the duration of individual dust outbreaks and reconstruct the transport routes of dust plumes on the case-by-case basis. We demonstrate that a combination of meteorological visibility data, TOMS Aerosol Index, MODIS optical depth over the land, and a qualitative analysis of MODIS, AVHRR, and SeaWiFS imagery enables to constrain the regions of origin of dust outbreaks, though various limitations of such an approach were revealed. Over the oceans, the presence of persistent clouds provides a main limitation in identifying the regions in the Pacific Ocean affected by dust outbreaks, so only partial reconstruction of dust transport routes reaching the west cost of the U.S. was possible.