Seasonal dust aerosol optical depth patterns using MODIS Deepblue aerosol product and MERRA-2 aerosol reanalysis

Dust storm as one of severe natural disasters occur frequently in central Australia. Ground-based networks with visibility and PM observation instruments are more often used for dust storm monitoring and research. With the development of satellite remote sensing and general circulation models (GCM), dust storm research has been with larger spatial coverage, especially where ground-based stations cannot be installed. The Deepblue (DB) aerosol product from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) provide long-term aerosol records over 20 years from 2000 to the present. In this study, a dust AOD dataset was produced using MODIS DB and MERRA-2 aerosol reanalysis. The comparison of the dust AOD with AERONET data shows that 71% of collocated data points are within an EE of . The dust AOD dataset was then used to study seasonal dust distribution in Australia. Results show that dust storms occur more frequently in eastern Australia than the western part. In the northern part of eastern Australia, dust storm intensity reached the peak in the spring while in the southern part dust storm occur more frequently in the summer. Additionally, dust storms obtained from MODIS differs from those from traditional site observations, which reveals that our understanding on dust storm over regions without observations might be with large uncertainty.