Thursday, 13 January 2000: 11:00 AM
Although dust storms are a regular phenomenon in eastern New Mexico and the Southern High Plains of Texas, Spring 1999 was marked by several unusually strong events in which mineral aerosols were transported and deposited hundreds of kilometers from their source area. Events of April 9 in New Mexico, and April 14 and May 4-5 in western Texas and New Mexico, all produced dust plumes discernible on GOES visible imagery. We developed an integrated assessment of these individual events, using surface and upper-air meteorological observations, a variety of remote sensing platforms, and models of large-scale aerosol generation and transport. GOES imagery, multispectral AVHRR data, and Earth Probe TOMS aerosol indices have been used to investigate the potential trajectories of the particulate matter plumes. NOGAPS model friction velocities and NAAPS Global Aerosol Model optical depth simulations were used to estimate the dynamical forcing and dust particle concentrations, respectively. Surface and satellite data from a well-observed event are useful to calibrate and validate synoptic-scale models of dust aerosol transport. Understanding how these data sources and models interpret an event in real time improves our ability to reconstruct past cases of long-distance aerosol transport and forecast the behavior of future large-scale dust outbreaks.
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