Satellite-aided forecasting of dust storms and their societal effects in the western United States: Progress, Challenges and Lessons Learned
Abstract
Dust storms affect the environment and society in numerous ways, from air quality to human health and transportation safety. This work presents the progress of a NASA-funded satellite-aided dust forecasting project that aims at improving dust forecasting capability for air quality, public health, and transportation safety applications. Improvements of numerical dust prediction are achieved through assimilating satellite observations of land surface conditions, including MODIS/VIIRS bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF)/albedo and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). Products from model predictions and satellite observations are also used to quantify societal effects of dust storms, such as their effects on fatal highway crashes and other socioeconomic sectors. A comparison of three dust fatalities datasets shows that the Natural Hazard Statistics, a widely used public data platform, underreports the number of the fatalities by one order of magnitude. Coordinated efforts are being made to understand the full spectrum of societal effects on human health, environmental health, and safety in partnership with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in the United States and beyond. Finally, we will also discuss the challenges in predicting and mitigating the effects of dust storms, including the difficulty in predicting the most impactful "killer" dust storms, issues related to collecting and presenting data of traffic fatalities caused by dust storms, and gaps in knowledge of understanding the roles of dust storms in Valley fever infection.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFMGH42B..07T