Abstract
Millions of people suffer from health problems due to poor air quality in regions of high particulate pollution. Therefore, this paper proposes for better understanding of the impact of dust storms on both short- and long-term environmental factors that can help in a preferable formulation of warning and prediction scenarios in arid regions. We evaluate the effect of dust storms on the optical properties of aerosols and meteorological parameters by employing both ground-based and satellite remote sensing approaches. For this, we use AERosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET), MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO), Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI), Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (S-NPP), and Sentinel-5 Precursor (S5P) to retrieve aerosol optical properties from 15 May 2021 to 20 May 2021 over Karachi. At 550nm, the instantaneous maximum values of aerosol optical depth (AOD) are measured to be ~0.8, and 0.59 on 16 May 2021, and the lowest values of Ångström Exponent (AE) are discovered to be ~0.2, and ~0.26 by Aqua-MODIS and AERONET respectively. Such observations are attributed to dust aerosols over Karachi; these values are more than those that might be expected on an ordinary day. We also found S5P and OMI retrieved ultraviolet aerosol index (UVAI) of about 1 and ~1.9 on 17 May 2021 respectively which indicate the presence of absorbing (dust) aerosols. Subtypes of aerosols derived by CALIPSO with vertical profile taken on 17 May 2021 segregate the widespread aerosol burden as contaminated dust particles over surrounding regions of Karachi (24.48–30.59° N, 69.01–70.56° E).
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Data availability
You can obtain the data used in the current study from the Google Earth Engine website (https://code.earthengine.google.com/), NASA’s Giovanni portal (https://giovanni.gsfc.nasa.gov/), NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) website (https://www.ready.noaa.gov/HYSPLIT.php), AERONET site (https://aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov/), NASA’s Worldview website (https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/), Physical Sciences Laboratory website (https://psl.noaa.gov/), and NASA’s CALIPSO satellite (https://www-calipso.larc.nasa.gov/).
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Acknowledgements
We appreciate NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (ARL) for providing the HYSPLIT transport and dispersion model website (https://www.ready.noaa.gov/HYSPLIT.php). We additionally credit NOAA NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis group for the meteorological datasets. We are grateful to MODIS, OMI, CALIPSO, TROPOMI, and VIIRS mission scientists to produce the data used in this work. We are also thankful to NASA and the Institute of Space Technology for installing and maintaining the Karachi AERONET site (https://aeronet.gsfc.nasa.gov/) and providing the data.
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Rimsha Arshad conducted analysis and wrote the manuscript, Salman Tariq wrote the manuscript and Zia ul-Haq conceptualized the work and wrote the manuscript.
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Arshad, R., Tariq, S. & ul-Haq, Z. An analysis of aerosol properties during a dust storm due to the TAUKTAE cyclone using remote sensing. Air Qual Atmos Health 16, 1737–1760 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-023-01370-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-023-01370-9