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Prediction of sand and dust storms in West Asia under climate change scenario (RCPs)

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Abstract

This study investigates sand and dust storms under RCP scenarios over the West Asia. The RegCM 4.7 was employed to simulate the dust event with non-hydrostatic core, a horizontal grid spacing of 20 km and 18 vertical sigma levels with the model top at 10 hPa. Data for running RegCM were extracted from the ICTP website and HadGEM2 database. The simulations were conducted for historical (1996–2005) and future (2021–2032) periods. The evaluation of HadGEM2 model using AERONET and MISR data revealed that the model could reproduce the aerosol features with a very high confidence. During the historical period, the AOD and DCB were strong in spring and summer with higher values mostly situated in Rab’ al Khali desert of Arabian Peninsula, Red Sea, and the east of Dasht-e Lut. The atmospheric pattern at SLP and 850 hPa levels revealed that these regions are affected by strong dust outflows from the dipole in pressure between Indian-Pakistan low-pressure and high-pressure systems in the north of Africa and Caspian Sea plus cyclogenesis during dust storms. Also, the positive values of aerosol asymmetry parameter proved that aerosols in inland area are associated with dust outflows from the Rab’ al Khali and the Dasht-e Lut deserts along with air pollution from industrial activities and the Sahara Desert dust in the coastal region. The future dust emission under RCP scenarios indicated that AOD and DCB values would diminish in all months especially in spring and the highest AOD would happen in the center and south of Arabian Peninsula, Red Sea, and southeast of Iran. Also, the dust emission flux would decrease in spring and increase in summer and fall as compared to present. The South Sinai and Arabian Peninsula would have the most frequent dust emission flux too, but the dust emission flux would significantly drop in the southeast of Iran. The results from RCPs also demonstrated that the wind speed mean would decrease and the mean of soil moisture increase by about 6–6.5 kg/m2 up to a depth of 10 cm in all RCP scenarios.

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Data availability

The data used in this paper have been prepared by referring to United States Geological Survey (USGS) from this link: https://www.usgs.gov/products/data.

Code availability

Not available.

Notes

  1. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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Funding

This work is financially supported and performed under the auspices of the Iran National Science Foundation and the University of Tarbiat Modares in the program of postdoctoral research projects.

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  1. Iran National Science Foundation, University of Tarbiat Modares, Tehran, Iran

    Fatemeh Rabbani

  2. Department of Remote Sensing, University of Tarbiat Modares, Tehran, Iran

    Mohammad Sharifikia

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Fatemeh Rabbani conceived of the presented idea and developed the theory and performed the computations. Mohammad Sharifikia verified the analytical methods and supervised the findings of this work. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the final manuscript.

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Rabbani, F., Sharifikia, M. Prediction of sand and dust storms in West Asia under climate change scenario (RCPs). Theor Appl Climatol 151, 553–566 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-022-04240-z

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