Dust storms in the Sahara and Sahel: Nowcasting and its application to understanding dust emission and transport

"Dust storms are a dramatic weather hazard, and dust is an essential component of earth's climate system, affecting radiation and coupling with the carbon cycle. The inherent difficulties in modelling dust storms mean there is a need and opportunity for dust predictions based directly on forward extrapolations of observations, i.e. "nowcasts", a technique that is very successfully used for short-range prediction of convective storms. This project will develop a tool for dust nowcasting, and then use this tool to fill key gaps in our understanding of dust emissions and the Earth's dust cycle, informing development of models.

The project will focus on the Sahara and Sahel, due to their importance for the global dust cycle, vulnerable populations and the high quality data available from Meteosat, which is in geostationary orbit. We will first apply data science techniques to forward extrapolate satellite retrievals of airborne dust to generate nowcast predictions and evaluate these to understand variations in skill. Using the newly developed tool, combined with reanalyses, and other remotely-sensed products we will generate new understanding of sources, and their variability, as well as new quantification of the role of different meteorological mechanisms in dust uplift. If time allows, and as a possible application of the above findings, we will apply the above approach to investigate dust emissions from other important regions, such as the Middle East desert and the Gobi desert.