HR: 13:55h
AN: A53H-02    [Abstracts]
TI: Dragon Breath in the American West: Inter-Annual Correlations Between Dust Storms in Asia and PM₁₀ in the Western U.S. as Seen by IMPROVE and MODIS Data
AU: * Fischer, E V
EM: efischer@atmos.washington.edu
AF: Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Box 351640, Seattle, WA 98195, United States
AU: * Fischer, E V
EM: efischer@atmos.washington.edu
AF: Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington-Bothell 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011, United States
AU: Hsu, N C
EM: Christina.Hsu@nasa.gov
AF: Earth Sciences Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Jaffe, D A
EM: djaffe@u.washington.edu
AF: Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington-Bothell 18115 Campus Way NE, Bothell, WA 98011, United States
AU: Jeong, M
EM: mjeong@climate.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: Earth Sciences Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, United States
AU: Jeong, M
EM: mjeong@climate.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, United States
AU: Gong, S L
EM: Sunling.Gong@ec.gc.ca
AF: Air Quality Research Division, Science and Technology Branch, Environment Canada, Toronto, ON M3H 5T4, Canada
AB: The deserts of western China and Mongolia are large sources of atmospheric dust on a hemispheric scale especially during spring when meteorological conditions are most favorable for lofting and long range transport. Specific case studies and long-term records have shown that there can be significant surface particulate matter impacts in North America from Asian dust. Our preliminary analysis using the number of Asian dust storms each spring indicates a strong correlation with PM₁₀ in the western United States. In this work we extend this analysis to include MODIS maps of aerosol properties determined from the Deep Blue algorithm. We use area- averaged aerosol optical thickness (AOD) over the two main dust source regions, the Taklamakan Desert and the Gobi Desert, with surface aerosol observations from the IMPROVE network in the western United States. The Deep Blue algorithm provides an enhanced measure of AOD over these highly reflective dust source regions, while the IMPROVE data provides a policy-relevant measure of aerosol concentrations in the United States. Preliminary results based on three years of data show a strong correspondence between the inter-annual variations in area-averaged AOD over the Asian deserts and seasonally averaged PM₁₀ and fine Ca²⁺ mass in the western United State. This work is being extended to include spring 2000 through 2006. The additional data will provide insight into factors responsible for the relationship between these two distant but related measures of air quality. We hypothesize that these factors will include meteorological conditions, transport pathways, and satellite sampling frequency.
DE: 0305 Aerosols and particles (0345, 4801, 4906)
DE: 0345 Pollution: urban and regional (0305, 0478, 4251)
DE: 0365 Troposphere: composition and chemistry
DE: 1630 Impacts of global change (1225)
DE: 1640 Remote sensing (1855)
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting