Analysis of the Climatology and Transport Pathways of Iraq Dust Storms between 1985-2013

Abstract

The interest of investigating the phenomenon of dust storms comes from their direct impact on human and ecosystem health and climate global change. Despite that the majority of previous investigations performed in many parts of the Middle East, Africa and China, however the main source regions of dust storms in Iraq and the processes that govern their evolution have not been well studied, making their effects an important fact of uncertainty in future dust storms predictions in the region. The key importance of this study is determining the meteorological, source regions and transport pathways. The analysis in this work was based on a 3 hourly meteorological dataset (dust storms, wind speed and wind direction observations) collected over a 29 year period (1985-2013) which was obtained from the Iraqi Meteorological Organisation (IMO), for which systematic observations were available for 11 ground surface stations across Iraq. As well as that this thesis investigated in the Iraqi dust storms events from SEVIRI (Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager) satellite data point of view, the ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) 10m wind-field reanalysis data and air mass history of backward and forward trajectories from the HYSPLIT (HYbrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory) model. Dust storms were found to be highly associated with north-westerly winds and are often associated high wind speeds (15-20 ms-1). Dust storms were observed to be more frequent during March-September, particularly in the daytime (06:00-15:00) and that they are short lived (

Date of Award	31 Dec 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Hugh Coe (Supervisor) & Grant Allen (Supervisor)