the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Emerging extreme Saharan-dust events expand northward over the Atlantic and Europe prompting record-breaking PM10 and PM2.5 episodes
Abstract. Unprecedented extreme Saharan-dust (duxt) events have recently expanded northward, from subtropical NW Africa to the NE Atlantic and SW Europe, affecting the Canary Islands and mainland Spain. These six historic duxt episodes occurred 3–5 February 2020, 22–29 February 2020, 15–21 February 2021, 14–17 January 2022, 29 January–1 February 2022 and 14–20 March 2022. We analysed data of 330 Governmental Air Quality Monitoring Stations (AQMSs) of Spain, where PM10 and PM2.5 are measured with European EN-standards, and found that during duxt events PM10 concentrations are underestimated due to technical limitations of some PM10 monitors to properly measure extremely high concentrations. We assessed the consistency of PM10 and PM2.5 data and reconstructed 1414 PM10 (1 h average) data of 48 AQMSs by using our novel duxt-r method. During duxt events, 1-hour average PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations were within the range 1000–6000 μg/m3 and 400–1200 μg/m3, respectively. The meteorological and dust modelling-reanalyses show that the intense winds leading to massive dust plumes occurred within meteorological dipoles formed by a blocking anticyclone over western Europe and a cut-off low located at the southwest, near the Canary Islands, Cape Verde or into the Sahara. These cyclones reached this region by two main paths: deviated southward from the Atlantic mid-latitudes westerly circulation by the blocking anticyclone over western Europe or deviated northward from the tropical belt. The 22–29 February 2020 event led to (24 h average) PM10 and PM2.5 within the range 600–1840 μg/m3 and 200–404 μg/m3, being the most intense dust episodes ever recorded in the Canary Islands. The 14–20 March 2022 event led to (24 h average) PM10 and PM2.5 values within the range 500–3070 μg/m3 and 100–690 μg/m3 in south-eastern, 200–1000 μg/m3 and 60–260 μg/m3 in central and 150–500 μg/m3 and 75–130 μg/m3 in northern regions of mainland Spain and to 150–430 μg/m3 and 30–80 μg/m3 in the Canary Islands, respectively, being the most intense dust episode ever recorded in mainland Spain. The analysis of the 2000–2022 PM10 and PM2.5 time series shows that these six duxt events have no precedent in Spain. All duxt events occurred during northern-hemisphere meteorological anomalies characterised by shifted to higher latitudes subtropical anticyclones, anomalous low pressures expanding beyond the tropical belt and a mid-latitudes amplified Rossby-waves undulation; these overall features resemble the anomalies of the atmospheric circulation linked to the anthropogenic global warming.
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-3083', Anonymous Referee #1, 22 Apr 2024
The paper presents an exhaustive analysis of extreme dust episodes that ocurred in the last 4 years in wester europe.The episodes are relevant and the analysis is quite complete. However there are no innovative methods developed or new challenges to handle. I am favour of publication after some minor and major changes to be addressed. See below my comments.
Abstract (page 1)
Line 8: "occurred on 3-5 February..."
Line 13: a novel method is mentioned but nothing is said about it. The authors should indicate the basis of the method.
Line 25: Why only monitoring stations from Spain territory was analysed? It would be interesting to extend this analysis to other countries/regions that were also affected, e.g. PortugalMethodology
Page 4, Section 2.2: more details should be given on the use of these satellite data (which paremeters; which time and spatial coverage...)Results and discussion
Page 7, Line 30: The asssumptions behind this method have to be identified and discussed, like, the authors consider that the low variability of the ratio PM2.5/PM10 obtained with the stations with available data allows to consider and apply an average value to the reconstruction of the time series in stations where data is not available
Page 10, Line 10: only here it is explained how the comparison between reconstruction and measurements were done (Figure 3). This should be discuss before presenting Figure 3
Page 10, line 16: see "loos" instead of "loose"
Page 11, Line 1-4: please be consistent writing the name of the months
Page 11, Line 8: The title of this section (3.2) is not clear, do not give any information about the content
Page 11, Line 9-12: There is a repetition...please avoid this along the manuscript
Page 11, section 3.2: This section is characterized by an exhaustive descrition of each episode. It would be interesting to have some summary with the main characteristics of each episode and its comparison
Page 15, Figure 6: it should be mentioned that figures B, C, D and E are related to different days
Page 23, Lines 10-20: there is, again, repetition on the information of the episode values!
Page 30: It should be interesting to finish this section with same statistical quantification on the long time-series analysis (trend analysis)Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-3083-RC1 -
RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-3083', Anonymous Referee #2, 23 Apr 2024
Rodríguez and López-Darias report on six recent extreme dust events observed across mainland Spain and the Canary Islands, which they claim represent an emerging new trend of extreme Saharan dust events linked to global warming. The paper i) reports PM10 and PM2.5 concentration measurements from air quality monitoring stations (including a method for correcting saturated values during the extreme events), ii) provides analyses of the synoptic weather situations during the extreme events, and iii) provides a climatological assessment of the recent events and associated meteorological anomalies. My expertise is related to part i) and the in situ measurements of dust concentrations. I find this part of the paper to be generally well done. I am more skeptical about the final parts of the paper and feel the authors may need to limit some of their conclusions here.
I think the claims of 'record breaking' and 'a new phenomenon driven by global warming' probably need to be toned down. Climatologically speaking, the periods considered are short. For mainland Spain, there has only been 1 extreme event (dx-06) so far. For the Canaries, only a handful of events. I think its fair to hypothesize that this is the emergence of a new phenomenon potentially related to global warming. However the number of observed events is simply too small to make very strong conclusions, which is the impression I currently get from the paper.
The synoptic and climatological analyses are interesting but I feel the conclusions drawn from these investigations might be overstretched. I reiterate that I am not an expert in this type of analysis. Nevertheless, there have been quite a few recent papers on this topic that the authors have not cited: e.g., Flaounas et al., 2015 and 2022, Fluck and Raveh-Rubin 2023a and b, Merdji et al., 2023. As a non-expert I'm wondering how the major claims presented here (i.e., lines 25 to 28 in the abstract) are related to the results of similar previous studies.
The authors might want to comment on the seasonal aspect of their results. Events with northward transport of Saharan Dust are typically more frequent during spring and summer. However, the events described here occurred in the winter and early spring.
Given that only Spanish observations are reported I think the 'Europe' should be replaced by 'Spain' in the title.
A comment about presentation style: the authors have amassed an impressively wide array of detailed information. It is generally well-presented and thus possible to follow. However, I confess that I struggled to comprehend all of the detail. The authors might consider trying to improve readability by removing some of the finer level detail and/or presenting it in a more concise format. For example, there is a lot of listing of PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations recorded at different stations, like the paragraph on lines 12-31 on page 19. This paragraph is very difficult to read. Is it necessary? One can already see the spatial distributions of daily averages in Fig. 9.
Similarly, the authors use many compound plots combine many different elements and tend to be very detailed. Everything is explained well so this is not necessarily a problem. However, the authors may want to consider simplifying some of the figures considering the figures will be shrunk down in the final publication. For example, Fig. 1 currently covers 2 A4 pages simply with pictures and newspaper headlines. There is a lot of redundant information and many details will anyway be lost when the figure is shrunken down.
The authors introduce a new term: duxt events. I suggest they provide a more precise definition of this term and what differentiates duxt and regular dust events.
P2, L4: Typo. 'Mayor' instead of 'Major'P2, L12: Typo...'loos'.
P2, L13: Typo...'loose'
P2, L20: The English grammar in the last part of this sentence is wrong, could be changed to "..., while dust events with PM10 > 100 ug/m3 are unusual."
P4, L8: Typo...'abord'.
P7, L15: Typo...'loose'.
P8, L2: The difference in PM2.5/PM10 ratios between duxt and regular dust events is somewhat surprising and possibly deserves further comment. The implication is that the size distribution of dust particles is shifted towards larger diameters during the duxt events. It could be interesting to speculate why this is the case. To validate the result and prove it is not an artifact of the interpolation method, it would be interesting to know if the difference in ratios between the duxt and regular dust events also occurs at the 4 AQMSs capable of recording PM10 values > 1000 ug/m3.
P9, Fig. 1: The number of points marked invalid in panels A) and B) do not match.
P10, L19 and L22: I suggest writing 'and' explicitly rather than '+' to avoid confusion.
References:
Flaounas, E., Kotroni, V., Lagouvardos, K., Kazadzis, S., Gkikas, A., & Hatzianastassiou, N. (2015). Cyclone contribution to dust transport over the Mediterranean region. Atmospheric Science Letters, 16(4), 473–478. https://doi.org/10.1002/asl.584Flaounas, E., Davolio, S., Raveh-Rubin, S., Pantillon, F., Miglietta, M. M., Gaertner, M. A., Hatzaki, M., Homar, V., Khodayar, S., Korres, G., Kotroni, V., Kushta, J., Reale, M., & Ricard, D. (2022). Mediterranean cyclones: Current knowledge and open questions on dynamics, prediction, climatology and impacts. Weather and Climate Dynamics, 3(1), 173–208. https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-3-173-2022
Fluck, E., & Raveh-Rubin, S. (2023a). A 16-year climatology of the link between dry air intrusions and large-scale dust storms in North Africa. Atmospheric Research, 292, 106844. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2023.106844
Fluck, E., & Raveh-Rubin, S. (2023b). Dry air intrusions link Rossby wave breaking to large-scale dust storms in Northwest Africa: Four extreme cases. Atmospheric Research, 286, 106663. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2023.106663
Merdji, A. B., Lu, C., Xu, X., & Mhawish, A. (2023). Long-term three-dimensional distribution and transport of Saharan dust: Observation from CALIPSO, MODIS, and reanalysis data. Atmospheric Research, 286, 106658. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.atmosres.2023.106658
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-3083-RC2
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