Mineral dust aerosols have manifold impacts on the Earth’s environment, including effects on the atmospheric heat budget and on cloud formation, as well as posing threats to solar energy production, air quality and human health, and disruption to public transportation. Desert dust is a major species of natural aerosol in the global system, often transported during intense events, providing strong and distinct signatures that may be used to discriminate it from other aerosol types.

Remote sensing is a major tool used for the identification of atmospheric dust, as well as providing information on its quantity, horizontal and vertical distributions, mineralogy, microphysical and optical properties, and its radiative effects. Such measurements are routinely taken from above, within, and at the bottom of the atmosphere. Remote sensing techniques are able to regularly observe dust events initiated in remote desert regions and long-range transport of dust in elevated layers which are difficult to observe using conventional in-situ techniques on a regular basis. However mineral dust also poses unique challenges and opportunities to remote sensing techniques, for example due to the wide range of particle sizes lofted to higher altitudes. These measurement techniques, and the scientific information that they provide, are currently an active and vibrant area of atmospheric science.

This session is focused on the remote sensing of dust from a space-borne, airborne or ground-based perspective using active and/or passive techniques. It is open to contributions dealing with: (i) new, innovative instrumental concepts and processing techniques for dust characterisation, (ii) the characterisation and qualification of remote sensing products by comparison with exogenous data, and iii) a particularly original use of remote sensing observations for a thematic application related to dust.