Impact of Asian dust on air quality

Mineral dust aerosol originating in East Asia (China and Mongolia) can be transported over large distances causing adverse impacts on air quality across vast geographical regions. In this study we use the regional dust modeling system WRF-DuMo to investigate the contribution of dust to PM fields. The WRF-DuMo model offers several dust emission schemes of different complexity, flexible run-time options for initial size distributions, dust injection height, and advanced terrestrial preprocessor to simulate size resolved dust fields. Focusing on East Asian dust sources, the goal of this work is to investigate the sensitivity of modeled PM2.5, PM10 and visibility to parameterizations of dust emission and size distribution. A-Train satellite observations were used in conjunction with the WRF-DuMo model to characterize the dynamics of dust fields and linkages between PM2.5 and aerosol optical depth. A dust hazard index was introduced to identify the areas affected by increased PM level concentrations due to elevated dust loadings.