ALBERT

Description: These data describes changes in western US snow water equivalent (SWE) over the 1982–2017 water years. This includes observations of SWE from the NRCS SNOTEL network, the parameters used to fit the observed annual cycles of SWE to a gamma distribution PDF, and the parameters needed to recreate western US SWE on an equal angle grid. SWE values for the beginning of the water years in the fitted and fitted+interpolated values are overestimated. Thus, these data do not constitute a continuous time series from one year to the next. This is due to the fact that the tail of the Gamma distribution PDF does not drop off quickly enough to capture the rise in SWE at the beginning of the water year.

Description: The AR "dust score" characterizes the dustiness of the environment associated with ARs that made landfall along the west coast of the U.S. between 2001 and 2018 using satellite-based observations. The AR dust score is calculated from the average of dust aerosol optical depth within the horizontal boundaries of the landfalling AR, as defined by the Rutz AR catalogue. This dataset has been used to investigate how often dust is present in the surroundings of ARs along the U.S. west coast, as dust can impact cloud microphysics and precipitation from these storms. Further information describing the calculation of an AR dust score can be found in Voss et al. (2020) (doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-20-0059.1).

Description: Dust Aerosol Optical Depth deprived from the MODIS sensor on the Terra satellite platform at 1 degree latitude x 1 degree longitude spatial resolution between 45 south and 50 north.

Description: Changes in the emission, transport and deposition of aeolian dust have profound effects on regional climate, so that characterizing the lifecycle of dust in observations and improving the representation of dust in global climate models is necessary. A fundamental aspect of characterizing the dust cycle is quantifying surface dust fluxes, yet no spatially explicit estimates of this flux exist for the World's major source regions. Here we present a novel technique for creating a map of the annual mean emitted dust flux for North Africa based on retrievals of dust storm frequency from the Meteosat Second Generation Spinning Enhanced Visible and InfraRed Imager (SEVIRI) and the relationship between dust storm frequency and emitted mass flux derived from the output of five models that simulate dust. Our results suggest that 64 (±16)% of all dust emitted from North Africa is from the Bodélé depression, and that 13 (±3)% of the North African dust flux is from a depression lying in the lee of the Aïr and Hoggar Mountains, making this area the second most important region of emission within North Africa.

Description: African dust outbreaks are the result of complex interactions between the land, atmosphere, and oceans, and only recently has a large body of work begun to emerge that aims to understand the controls on-and impacts of-African dust. At the same time, long-term records of dust outbreaks are either inferred from visibility data from weather stations or confined to a few in situ observational sites. Satellites provide the best opportunity for studying the large-scale characteristics of dust storms, but reliable records of dust are generally on the scale of a decade or less. Here the authors develop a simple model for using modern and historical data from meteorological satellites, in conjunction with a proxy record for atmospheric dust, to extend satellite-retrieved dust optical depth over the northern tropical Atlantic Ocean from 1955 to 2008. The resultant 54-yr record of dust has a spatial resolution of 1° and a monthly temporal resolution. From analysis of the historical dust data, monthly tropical northern Atlantic dust cover is bimodal, has a strong annual cycle, peaked in the early 1980s, and shows minimums in dustiness during the beginning and end of the record. These dust optical depth estimates are used to calculate radiative forcing and heating rates from the surface through the top of the atmosphere over the last half century. Radiative transfer simulations show a large net negative dust forcing from the surface through the top of the atmosphere, also with a distinct annual cycle, and mean tropical Atlantic monthly values of the surface forcing range from -3 to -9 W/m**2. Since the surface forcing is roughly a factor of 3 larger in magnitude than the top-of-the-atmosphere forcing, there is also a positive heating rate of the midtroposphere by dust.

Description: Contained here are meteorological measurements made during a dust storm in southern California on February 22, 2020. The measurements were made from a research site located at 33.169 N and -115.856 E and managed by the lab of Professor Amato Evan (Scripps Institution of Oceanography and University of California San Diego. The data collection includes a netcdf file of backscatter measurements made from a Vaisala CL51 ceilometer and generated via output from BLView, a netcdf file containing 1-minute averaged surface meteorological measurements made from a Vantage Pro2 Davis Met Station, and separate datasets containing measurements made from 4 radiosondes launched throughout the coarse of this day. All data are described in detail and analyzed in: Measurements of a Dusty Density Current in the Western Sonoran Desert by A. T. Evan, W. Porter, R. Clemensha, A. Kuwano, and R. Frouin, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 2022, doi:10.1029/2021JD035830.