Dear Colleagues,

Dust storms (frequently addressed as sand and dust storms) are a local weather phenomenon that could develop to have an effect on a regional and even global scale. The atmospheric dust cycle in the climate system is a natural global cycle which is multipurpose: it interacts with energy, water, and the carbon cycle. Dust storms are created when high-velocity surface winds impact land surfaces that are dust productive. They can inject dust into the upper atmosphere where horizontal transport is dominant and carries the finest dust particles at far distances. Land surface dust productivity can be increased by diverse direct human impacts, such as tillage, grazing, mining, and water overconsumption. Indirect human impacts relate to the increase in soil exposure and dryness induced by climate change. The deposition of dust back to the Earth’s surface can be near or far from the emission areas depending on the particle size composition and atmospheric circulation.

Monitoring and modeling of dust storms serves to enhance the knowledge on the atmospheric dust transport, source areas, affected areas, and extent of dust-storm impacts. Both can provide information for warning systems and risk assessments, and thereby to contribute to the protection of health, the economy, and the environment.

Observation of dust storms has limitations because of the scarce ground measurements and sometimes inapplicable/unavailable satellite measurements. Forecasting dust storms is not usually the component of the national forecasting systems in the affected areas but is rather in an experimental stage in scientific institutions, or the products are derived from the regional dust forecasting centers (for example, those developed by WMO SDS-WAS; link, acronime ?). The dust forecast quality is highly sensitive to the prognostic model set-up (domain, resolution), to the quality of input data related to the soil surface characteristics/conditions, and to related information on the dust source distribution, to the capacity of the model to accurately predict the weather forecast which impacted the dust storm generation and development, etc. For this reason, the dust forecast quality can differ among models, and the forecast performance can vary from case to case. Thereby, the monitoring and forecasting of dust storms represent a great challenge.

This Special Issue is open to any novel studies related to dust-storm observations and modeling/forecasting, including studies related to dust sources, atmospheric transport, interactions with the environment, impacts, etc.

Dr. Ana Vukovic
Dr. Slobodan Nickovic
Guest Editors

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• mineral dust
• sand and dust storms
• atmospheric dust
• dust sources
• dust mineralogy
• dust modeling and forecasting
• dust observations
• dust–atmosphere interactions
• dust storms impacts
• dust cycle
• land surface