Investigation of Two Severe Shamal Dust Storms and the Highest Dust Frequencies in the South and Southwest of Iran

Abstract

Dust storms create some of the most critical air quality problems in the world; the Middle East, located in the dust belt, suffers substantially from dust storms. Iran, as a country in the Middle East, is affected by dust storms from multiple internal and external sources that mostly originate from deserts in Iraq and Syria (especially the Mesopotamia region). To determine the highest dust loadings in the south and west of Iran, dust frequencies were investigated in the eight most polluted stations in the west, southwest, and southern Iran for a period of 21 years from 2000 to 2021. During the study’s duration, the dust frequency was much higher from 2008 to 2012, which coincided with severe droughts reported in Iraq and Syria; from which, we investigated two severe dust storms (as well as the dust sources and weather condition effects) that took place on 15–17 September 2008 and 1–3 June 2012; we used secondary data from ground measurement stations, and satellite and modeling products. In both cases, horizontal visibility was reduced to less than 1 km at most weather stations in Iran. The measured PM10 in the first case reached 834 μg m−3 at Ilam station in west Iran and the Iran–Iraq borders while the measured PM10 in the second case reached 4947 μg m−3 at Bushehr station in the northern shore of the Persian Gulf. The MODIS true color images and MODIS AOD detected the dust mass over Iraq, southern Iran, and Saudi Arabia in both cases; the AOD value reached 4 in the first case and 1.8 in the second case over the Persian Gulf. During these two severe dust storms, low-level jets were observed at 930 hPa atmospheric levels in north Iraq (2008 case) and south Iraq (2012 case). The output of the NAPPS model and CALIPSO satellite images show that the dust rose to higher than 5 km in these dust storm cases, confirming the influence of Shamal wind on the dust storm occurrences.