A High Spatiotemporal Resolution Dust Tracking Framework based on MSG-SEVIRI

Dust storm is a common meteorological phenomenon in arid and semi-arid regions, often arising when strong winds uplift fine-grained particles into the air. Due to climate change, dust storms are having increasing frequency and intensity, thus bringing higher impacts to wildlife, human being, and bio-community. With the increasing available observations, such as geostationary and environmental satellites, dust can be monitored and detected using existing detection algorithms and methods. However, these detection methods usually provide qualitative information about dust outbreaks without tracking the dust transport pathways in a quantitative manner. This research presents a quantitative dust tracking framework by detecting and tracking dust events from the high-spatiotemporal-resolution Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) aboard Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellites. This framework is tested on detecting and tracking dust events occurred during March 2018 affecting Northern Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. The tracking results are validated by aerosol products from MODIS, CALIPSO, and AERONET. The results can be further expanded with interactive configurations for the tracking of dust events with different severity levels, impacting spatial areas, and temporal coverages, thus facilitating the better understanding of complex dust transport patterns.