Intercontinental transport of dust; historical and recent observational evidence

Abstract The scientific examination of the intercontinental dust transport has a long history, a vigorous present, and a promising future. Unlike the study of man-made pollution and bio-mass smoke, the fundamental causes of dust production, the long-range transport as well as the factors governing the removal processes of windblown dust were well established by about 1900. Much of the past century was devoted to the quantification of these processes using surface concentration monitors, aircraft sampling, and long-range transport modeling tools. By the 1990s, several new satellite sensors allowed a global-scale observation of the dynamic dust pattern. The aerosol climatologies derived from satellite data now highlight, in a semi-quantitative manner, the global distribution of dust sources. The dynamic daily aerosol data from several satellites, along with routine surface monitors now facilitates the quantitative documentation of individual intercontinental dust transport events from Sahara to Europe and the Americas, as well as from the Gobi desert to North America. In fact, the spectacular dust transport events visualized through the new satellite sensors along with the good performance of dust transport simulation and prediction models provide the most compelling evidence of intercontinental aerosol transport. Furthermore, the detection, tracking and the full explana